ABSTRACT
Current psychiatric care has failed many patients with mood disturbances, and perhaps it’s because the paradigm is incorrect. In many ways, modern psychiatry has served as a repository for the diagnostic and therapeutic limitations of conventional medicine. When a patient’s symptoms of malaise, brain fog, lethargy, inattention, insomnia, agitation, and at mood slip through the cracks of the discrete territories of specialty medicine, patients are referred for psychiatric prescription treatment. When they are treated with nonsteroidal anti-inammatory drugs (NSAIDs), statins, acid blockers, antibiotics, and birth control pills, the mechanistic insults of these medications are poorly appreciated by prescribers, side effects are dismissed, and patients are, again, referred for psychiatric care. What happens when psychiatric care itself is predicated on medication treatment with placebodriven short-term effects,1-3 and worse functional outcomes in the long term?4-6
Escalating incidence of mood disorders may be attributable to multiple sources. Some of these include socioeconomic changes, urbanicity, dietary changes (Western-style diet), sedentary behavior, excessive screen-based information consumption, lack of adequate sunlight, reduced ofine social support, and an overall disconnect from nature.7
