Contrary to popular wishful thinking, most of us still need about 8 hours of sleep a night which translates to 25 years of our life asleep. We live in an increasingly 24/7 society where sleep is not a priority and can be regarded as an unnecessary diversion of time that could be better spent elsewhere.
“Here’s proof that you have a mental illness: Have you ever been in love? And then realized at a later point in time that your beliefs and feelings about that other person had no basis in reality?” so said David Granirer at a recent mental health conference where he spoke about using comedy to confront mental illness and its public stigma.
Has there ever been a behavior, urge, or thought that you may have enjoyed but felt you could not control that effects your life or bothers you? These behaviors could include gambling, stealing, sexual behavior, compulsive shopping, fire-setting, Internet use, overeating, hair pulling or skin picking.
For the first time in my 25 year career in psychiatry, there seems to be some agreement among Western medicine researchers and functional medicine practitioners about the role of leaky gut (also called gut dysbiosis or intestinal permeability) as the gateway for chronic inflammation and its effects on the entire body including psychiatric and mood disorders.
Can that really be true? You may be wondering how that could happen given the problems that occurred with the misuse of LSD and magic mushrooms (psilocybin) by the youth culture in the 1960s. They were finally banned in the U.S. altogether in 1970 so there could be no further studies until recent years.
Doctors always recommend a healthy diet but the truth is I don’t even think anyone knows what that means anymore including most doctors themselves. The standard American diet is pretty much a disaster for the human body and mind. The other problem is that even if there was a consensus on what constitutes a healthy diet getting people motivated or inspired to adhere to it is very challenging. However, there was a young woman who presented to me with severe depressive symptoms. Medications were only temporarily helpful and even dietary changes revealed no consistent pattern until she hit upon a modified ketogenic diet.
