2024 was a year of surprises and perhaps the biggest one in the world of mental health was the FDA’s decision regarding MDMA in August.  There were a lot of expectations that 2024 would be the year that the psychedelic medication, MDMA, would be approved by the FDA for the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. However, in a startling turn of events the FDA rejected MDMA citing non-sufficient data collected. This is obviously a setback for the field and in this article I will explain what I believe went wrong and where this leaves us going forward with MDMA and other psychedelic research.

When I first wrote about microdosing lithium in October 2022, I had no idea of the widespread interest in this topic and the dearth of information available on it. I received a lot of emails with questions that were not specifically addressed in the original article. Hence, in this article, I will answer some of the most commonly asked questions, along with a couple case studies, and discuss why I believe lithium will continue to have an important role in the future.

The current psychedelic renaissance began in 1994 but no one could have predicted the cultural explosion of interest in the past 5 years and how desperate we are for new mental health treatments. However, some say we’re now preparing for the bursting of the psychedelic hype bubble and that may turn out be a good thing for the future of psychedelics. What began as a welcome glimmer of hope for new ways to treat mental illness has perhaps morphed into actual misinformation. In this next article, I will discuss the more challenging issues facing psychedelics and what needs to happen to keep their potential promise on track.

While traditional individual therapy has focused on unhealed personal trauma, in recent years there has been an increasing movement to incorporate the healing of collective trauma into an individual’s treatment. This next article will discuss this expanded map of trauma healing and what it means for reclaiming one’s natural, balanced state of being.

While you may be unfamiliar with the term, dissociation is more common than you might think. Perhaps you have a brief moment where you are out with friends enjoying lunch or sitting in a meeting at work, and you begin to feel out of touch with what’s happening around you. You may even draw a blank an hour later when trying to remember what was discussed at the meeting or maybe you drove home but don’t remember taking the route. Occurrences such as these are a mild and common form of dissociation experienced by most people but in the case of psychological dissociation, it’s not just a matter of daydreaming or getting lost in your thoughts, but rather a severe and chronic medical condition where the individual is detached from reality. In this next article, I will highlight our current understanding of dissociation and how it manifests in everyday life.

I believe there is an important role for MAOIs especially when nothing else seems to work for depression, social phobia, or panic disorder.  In this next article, I will highlight 3 patients over the past year who I have treated successfully with MAOIs.

In this article, I will discuss how the treatment of this MTHFR gene with L-methylfolate can change a treatment resistant depression into a responsive one or even eliminate the need for an antidepressant entirely.

One factor often overlooked in psychiatry is the quality of a person’s breathing especially those with a history of trauma, anxiety, panic symptoms or chronic stress. When stressed or anxious, there is a tendency to breathe more quickly and through the mouth. People often assume that breathing through the mouth is normal. It is not. We are designed and have evolved to breathe through the nose. In this next article, I will offer a few tweaks that may help the reader start to make corrections towards a healthier breath.