The UltraMind Solution (6 page)

The use of antidepressants has tripled in the last decade.

In 2006, expenditures on antidepressants soared to over $1.9 billion.

Psychiatric disorders like depression and anxiety are expensive.
⁵
They are among the top five most costly medical conditions, including heart disease, cancer, trauma, and lung disorders. The cost to our healthcare system exceeds $200 billion a year, which is over 12 percent of total healthcare spending.
⁶

Alzheimer’s disease will affect 30 percent (and some experts say 50 percent) of people over eighty-five years old, which is the fastest-growing segment of the population. It will affect 16 million people by 2050.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a label we now give 8.7 percent of children between the ages of eight and fifteen.
⁷

More than 8 million, or one in ten, children now take stimulant medications like methylphenidate (Ritalin).
⁸

Autism rates have increased from 3 in 10,000 children to 1 in 166 children—an elevenfold increase—over the last decade.
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Learning disabilities affect between 5 and 10 percent of school-age children.
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The indirect costs of all these broken brains to society are mammoth. They include loss of productivity at school, home, or in the workplace, accounting for a loss of over $80 billion a year.

There is something wrong with this picture. Nearly one in three of us suffers from a broken brain. Is this a normal part of the human condition?

No. It isn’t.

The problem is that we’ve been looking for answers to these problems in the wrong places—in the corners of our past, in the chemical “imbalances” in our brains, in the latest drug or therapeutic approach.

This is especially true of psychiatry and neurology, the two specialties that typically treat “brain disorders.”

Neurologists and psychiatrists focus on treating your brain using medications or psychotherapy. In fact, most psychiatrists and neurologists focus solely on their favorite organ, the brain, and ignore the rest of the body.

But what if the cure for brain disorders is
outside
the brain? What if mood, memory, attention and behavior problems, and most other “brain diseases” have their root cause in the rest of the body—in treatable imbalances in the body’s key systems? What if they are not localized in the brain? If this is true, it would mean our whole approach to dealing with brain disorders is completely backward.

Indeed, it is.

Psychiatry has its roots in the notion that previous life experiences or traumas control mood and behavior. This is the legacy of Sigmund Freud—that all mental illness is the result of childhood experiences.

Yet only about 10 percent of us are nutritionally, metabolically, and biochemically balanced enough to fully benefit from psychotherapy.

What’s more, years of psychoanalysis or therapy will not reverse the depression that comes from profound omega-3 fatty acid deficiencies,
¹¹
a lack of vitamin B
₁₂
,
¹²
a low-functioning thyroid,
¹³
or chronic mercury toxicity.
¹⁴