What goes wrong for the 10-15% of women who feel like hiding under the covers instead of gazing blissfully into their newborns peaceful face? Is it expectations unmet? Is it hormones? Is it the brain? Having spent several years treating these women, I believe that what we are calling postpartum depression and anxiety is in
Mental Illness in Pregnancy | To Medicate or Not Medicate
When a woman has a history of severe and relapsing mental illness, but is stable on her current treatment, and is planning a pregnancy or is postpartum, what is the best course of action for her and her baby? In my conventional training, I spent (and continue to spend) countless hours analyzing the available registry,
Vitamin D for Your Brain
Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin that influences T regulatory cells, critical for immune modulation. Consistent with inflammatory models of mental illness, vitamin D deficiency has been associated with major psychiatric diagnoses and now animal studies may be shedding light on mechanistic drivers. In this UK study, rats fed low vitamin D diets were
That Naughty Little Pill: Can Birth Control Cause Depression?
Are You On the Pill? It was early in my actualization as a righteous, post-adolescent that I began to think of birth control as a woman’s right. It would be years before I would learn the nuanced considerations of tacit permissiveness for unprotected sex, the wholesale delegation of contraception to the female counterpart, and the
The Head Bone’s Connected to the Body Bone
We have long been told that “low levels” of serotonin in the brain equal bad and sad, and we have been educated by the Pharmaceutical industry about the opportunity we have, through the use of antidepressants, to retrain our wayward neurons: by making the proverbial holes in the strainer that much smaller. But even if
