The Bad News IS the Good News

There’s been a lot of bad news regarding the treatment of mental health problems. The drug companies are declining to do research to find new drugs, the new DSM (the diagnostic dictionary that defines diagnoses like bipolar disorder, panic disorder, OCD, etc.) is under barrage for its lack of scientific basis, we’re losing more soldiers to suicide than to battle, and the Director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has declared that our treatments are “not effective enough” and “in many cases patients receiving the best of current care are not recovering.”*

How is any of this good news? We’ve finally hit the tipping point where things can actually start to change.

Reality is Peeping Through the Propaganda . . .

Grass-Fed Cheese Please!

I was in a Safeway store in a rural area yesterday and found a terrific bargain. Kerrygold Dubliner cheese is aged 12 months (meaning little or no lactose to give us gas and other gastric complaints) and is grass fed (which means it has a healthier fat profile than do cheeses from grain-fed cows). To top it off their regular price was only $7.57/lb or 47 cents a serving -- a bargain for grass fed cheese -- and this stuff is really good. It tastes something like an aged U.S. cheddar crossed with swiss cheese. Grass-fed cheese is hard to find in a regular supermarket and is usually quite expensive. Finding this at a good price in a rural area was a big win! I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for this in other supermarkets.

The fat profile stuff is important for those of us who have mood disorders. When it comes to Omega 3 fatty acids (something that just about every modern psychiatrist recommends his patients take fish oil supplements to get), it's not how much you take in,