The Inflamed Brain: Unravelling the connection between inflammation and depression
7 April 2025 It’s a truism among medical researchers that it takes an average of 17 years for evidence gathered through that research to change clinical practice. And what that means, is that practitioners who are adhering to the norms and guidelines of their professions continue to deploy useless, inferior or counterproductive investigations and treatments…
Under Nature’s Influence: How viewing nature scenes alters your brain’s response to pain
24 March 2025 A couple of weeks ago, I published a post on how the brain remembers pain and inflammation, how these brain-encoded memories can be retriggered, and what you can do to rewire them. One of the most important facts about pain that I stressed in this post – and that I always discuss…
On the pursuit of happiness
17 March 2025 Recently, I came across a paper that reported the findings of several studies that concluded that people who obsess over their own level of happiness end up more depressed, more negative, and less satisfied with their lives than people who are more or less unconcerned by how happy they are. On the…
Do antidepressants accelerate cognitive decline?
3 March 2025 If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you’ll know that I’m not the world’s biggest fan of antidepressant medications. Not only do they cause profound sexual dysfunction that may persist even after patients stop taking them, birth defects and an increased risk of premature birth in offspring of mothers who…
Fat body, starved brain
A study of over 35 000 brain scans has found that the more body fat you carry, the less blood flow your brain receives.
Cholesterol and depression: What’s bad for the heart is bad for the brain
16 December 2024 N.B. I hate those stupid trigger warnings that encourage grown adults to believe that they’ll be permanently psychologically harmed by reading about upsetting topics. But yeah, this post discusses suicide – a lot – so if you find that triggering, consider yourself warned. Anyhow… In the last post, I laid out the…
The vitamin D-ilemma
Part 2: The many faces of vitamin D… or, what doesn’t vitamin D do? As you’ll (hopefully) recall from Part 1 of this miniseries, the substance that we call “vitamin D” is not in fact a vitamin, but a hormone – specifically, a sequence of three metabolites that culminates in a secosteroid hormone called calcitriol…
Dr Dog will see you now
12 August 2024 After the last two posts which discussed serious concerns with the framing of depression-as-mental-illness, and the psychiatrisation of everyday suffering and distress as ‘mental illness’, I thought you might appreciate a somewhat lighter topic relating to human psychology. It just so happens that this one is very close to my heart, as…
Stop talking about your ‘mental health’
It’s making you – and everyone else – crazy 5 August 2024 I published last week’s post, The depression misconception, with some trepidation. In a society that has been steeped in the narrative of ‘depression-as-mental-illness’, labelling depression as ‘failure feedback’, and raising the possibility that it is actually a functional, adaptive response to significant failure,…
The depression misconception
29 July 2024 One of the best things about publishing my articles on Substack is the Comments section! I’ve been fortunate to attract some highly intelligent subscribers, who post thought-provoking comments in response to my articles. The following comment was left by one such subscriber, and as you’ll see, it was so on-point that I…