Whole-Body Psychiatry: Nutrition for Mental Health

“These are the same [disruptions] that underlie the chronic illnesses of Western society,” he explains. “Take inflammation, for instance: In one person, it might show up as diabetes, in another person as cardiovascular disease, in someone else as depression.”
Integrative psychiatrist and author Hyla Cass, MD, concurs. “Psychiatry is the only specialty that doesn’t test the organ involved, namely the brain,” she says. “If you have heart disease or hepatitis or diabetes, doctors will perform lab tests to monitor the system in question and treat accordingly. But if your inflamed brain shows symptoms of mental illness, all of a sudden they don’t consider the brain an organ anymore — they think we have to talk people out of that illness. Talk therapy and even the psychiatric medications can be helpful, but first we have to approach the biochemical root cause.”
Hedaya and Cass are part of a growing number of mental-health professionals who find the mainstream approach to mental illness insufficient. Many psychiatrists spend less than an hour evaluating a new patient and base their diagnosis and treatment plan on the symptoms that the patient reports and that they themselves see during the exam. Sometimes they will order scans to make sure a physical disorder — like a mass in the brain — isn’t causing the symptoms, but mostly they match the symptoms to a medication and, sometimes, recommend psychotherapy.
Integrative psychiatrists, on the other hand, might use these medications to stabilize a patient who is in a crisis state. Their overall goal, however, is to treat the underlying health issues through nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle changes.
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