In my article from last month, I talked about how the opioid epidemic was 20 years in the making due to opioids being overprescribed during that time period. It turns out the sugar epidemic has been 40 plus years in the making.

19th century philosopher, Karl Marx once said “religion is the opium of the masses” but one could also make the case in the 21st century America that “opium is now the religion of the masses.” 

I’ve gotten this question many times over the last couple years and only recently do I have a complete answer.  Like everyone else, getting trusted information from what’s available online has been a bit frustrating.  Even at psychiatric conferences, I felt some of the answers from my colleagues seem to conflict. There’s still a lot of unanswered questions but I feel it is important to share where things are at in tracking this nationwide trend.

This is a follow up to my January 2019 article, “Are we on the verge of a psychedelic revolution in mainstream psychiatry?” The answer to that question it turns out is not so fast.

As I get closer to releasing my self-help book, I realize the best metaphor for how it came together was like picking berries to make jam.  There were little pieces that came together to form a unique whole over a 15 year period.

In psychiatry, we usually think of energy as a way to describe how we are feeling mentally and/or physically. For example, depression tends to be associated with less energy, while mania is associated with increased energy. However, we can also look at energy in a big picture kind of way. The physical world and our bodies appear through the eye of nuclear physics to be a latticework of energies, in which the body is surrounded and permeated by an energy field which carries information.