Before You Diagnose Yourself, Diagnose the Country People keep walking into psychiatric offices saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” as if their brain spontaneously malfunctioned. A real issue for most people is not internal. It is environmental. We are living in a country where the emotional climate feels like a smoke alarm that...

Before help even begins, I often hear it: “We’re against meds.” It’s usually said with the same tone people use for “We don’t talk about the war.” I get it. No one wants to believe their brain might need something their willpower can’t fix. This morning, before I even met with a new patient, her...

Before a full-blown illness moves in and starts eating all your snacks, your brain and body usually give you some warning signs. They’re not dramatic. No violins. No flashing lights. Just little red flags waving while you say, “I’m fine, just tired.” Spoiler: you’re probably not fine. Let’s talk about those warnings: the mental ones,...

INTRODUCTION: Anxiety Is the National Mood (and the Default Setting) If aliens landed tomorrow and asked, “Take me to your calmest human,” we would have nothing to offer them except a barista on break who briefly forgot they had student loans. People say things like: “I work well under pressure.” “I am just busy.” “I...

December has two settings: Hallmark Movie Fantasy Emotional Hunger Games Every year, approximately 0% of humans experience the first one. We watch Christmas specials where beautiful people find love in four minutes, snow behaves like a mood stabilizer, and nobody has relatives. Meanwhile, the average adult spends December running six competing emotion programs on one...

“You are what you eat” is not just a motivational poster in your health class. It is chemistry. Every Red Bull, Twinkie, and pizza roll you eat literally becomes your blood, your brain tissue, your skin. Live on soda and Doritos and you are basically a vending machine with legs. When people say “balanced diet,”...

Prologue: When People Got Bored of Reality Movies were born in the late 1800s when photography got tired of sitting still and decided to move. In 1895, the Lumière brothers projected short films like Workers Leaving the Factory and Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, prompting early audiences to panic because they thought...

A Quick History The very first modern psych med, chlorpromazine (Thorazine), showed up in the 1950s. Its story starts earlier, in a chemistry lab, not a psychiatrist’s office. French researchers were tinkering with compounds originally related to treatments for allergies and malaria, and one of those tweaks accidentally produced a drug that calmed patients without...

The Second Brain You’ve Been Ignoring Let’s have a heart-to-gut talk about the forty trillion tiny squatters who live inside you. They are not just along for the ride. They help digest your breakfast burrito, train your immune system, produce vitamins, and send chemical messages that can literally change your mood. They have been here...

The Advice Everyone Gives (and No One Wants) “Have you tried exercise?” If you have ever been sad, anxious, stressed, tired, or just existing in a human body, someone, your doctor, your therapist, your gym teacher, your mom, the random guy on Twitter with #grindset in his bio, has probably offered this advice1. It is...