Today's keynote address at the Integrative Medicine for Mental Health was by Dr. Daniel Amen. It was entitled "The End of Mental Illness." There was an explicit double meaning in the title. First, Dr. Amen wants to do away with the epithet mental illness. He insists what we have been calling mental illness is decidedly brain illness, with physiological, biochemical causes from genetic and environmental dysfunction. It may seem like mere semantics, but Dr. Amen wants to emphasize the paradigm shift this is in psychiatric medicine. I am not a student of the history of psychiatry/psychology, but this seems to me to be the clean break from the era of Freud in which we view the mind as a nebulous mix of desires, emotional wounds, suppressed impulses, ego, id, etc. According to Dr. Amen, now is the era of scientifically based brain health, which would result in mental health (the second meaning of his chosen title). (Charismatic speakers/personalities often frame things in an either/or scenario to emphasize their unique perspective. I don't know, but would venture to guess that Dr. Amen is not trying to discount the benefit of all psychotherapy.)
This is great news for people suffering with a variety of mental health issues and for those of us practitioners who want to help, but find current conventional solutions lacking substantive results. My post yesterday was largely about organic acid testing, and this is clearly one of the initial steps for discovering what biochemical processes are involved in brain dysfunction. Today's lectures helped to clarify steps to take once we have the information from organic acid testing. In addition, I made sure to follow a lecture on mold toxicity as a promise I made to a particular patient. Research on mold is in its infancy, but I now have something to take back that will help them. I also realized that mold toxicity is a MUCH bigger deal than I knew. The rest of my evening is going to be spent reviewing what I learned about mycotoxins today.
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