Paula

Fyodor Dostoevsky's manuscript draft of The Brothers Karamazov, 1880

3/ it is validated and how long it takes for emerging realities to be integrated into practice. My experience has fundamentally altered my life. It has affected my physical health, mental wellbeing, independence and trust in medical care. While I have had periods of improvement, they exist within a broader context of instability that should never have been this severe or prolonged. This is not an argument against treatment, but against oversimplification. It is a call for intellectual honesty. Psychiatric drugs are not inert substances. They produce real, lasting changes in the brain and body. To present them without fully acknowledging the potential consequences of those changes is to provide patients with an incomplete picture. Patients deserve more than reassurance. They deserve transparency, nuance and the ability to make genuinely informed decisions. Until that standard is met, people will continue to enter treatment as I did, trusting the system, yet unprepared for what may follow. I’m not an outlier, I’m one of many. The number continues to grow significantly making this a global health crisis.

A major milestone today for the field of Metabolic Psychiatry, with the launch of the Global Network for the Advancement of Metabolic Psychiatry! 🧠⚡ MetPsy unites researchers and clinicians worldwide to advance evidence-based practice in metabolic psychiatry through clinical care, education, and research. Excited for the work ahead and all this group will accomplish!

(Note: Not medical or mental health advice) When something hurts you, your brain stores it. The sights, the sounds, the sting of the words, the shape of the moment. That storage is real and physical. But here’s where the hope of healing lies: your brain doesn’t get the final vote on what that memory means to you. Your mind does. And your mind is not the same thing as your brain. Emotional memories get encoded in circuits involving the amygdala and hippocampus, but each time you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily unstable and gets rewritten via a process called reconsolidation. That means every time you revisit a wound, you have a fresh chance to change how it’s stored. Self-Brain Surgery Procedure: The next time an old wound surfaces, don’t just relive it. Instead, reframe it while it’s “open.” Ask: What is the truest, most redemptive way to understand this moment now? Speak that new understanding out loud before you let the memory close back up. Scripture: “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” Psalm 147:3, NIV This is self-brain surgery, and it's hard and holy work. Follow me to connect neuroscience and scripture every day. Save this to help when you need to heal. Share it with a friend who's hurting. Click the link in my bio to learn more about Self-Brain Surgery. #selfbrainsurgery #neuroscience #neuroplasticity #grief #healing

The things you say to yourself turn into structural changes in your brain. Your brain automates those thoughts and feelings, and then they feed back and convince you they're true. So knock it off. The simplest fix I know is to use your name. When that harsh voice starts up, don't ask, "Why am I like this?" Ask, "What is Lee feeling right now?" Then talk to Lee the way you'd talk to someone you love. Researchers at Michigan State and the University of Michigan tested this with EEG and brain scans. When people thought about painful things using their own name instead of "I," the brain's emotional reaction dropped within seconds. Activity went down in the medial prefrontal cortex, a hub for self-focused thinking. People said they felt less distressed. And the scans showed it took no extra mental effort. David did this in the Psalms. In Psalm 42, verse 11, he talked to himself like a friend: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God." That's self-brain surgery. Thoughts become things. Call yourself by name, talk to yourself like somebody who loves you, and give yourself a chance to change your mind and change your life. Save this for the next time you need a reminder to be kind to yourself. Share it with someone who needs the tip. And follow me to connect the dots between neuroscience and faith to help you navigate life and find flourishing. Click the link in my bio to learn more about the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery. #selfbrainsurgery #anxiety #MentalHealth #neuroscience #grit

If someone talks to you like you're stupid in a meeting. Don't defend yourself. Say this instead.

Blood pressure has never once changed. The line on it has moved 6 times, and every time it moved, it moved towards you. 1931: a British physician writes in the BMJ that the greatest danger to a man with high blood pressure is its discovery, because some fool will then try to reduce it. 1937: America's most famous heart doctor calls hypertension a compensatory mechanism that should not be tampered with. 1944: the President's physician reads 186 over 108 and calls it normal for a man of his age. The President is dead within the year. 1950s: the rule of thumb in every surgery is 100 plus your age. At 60, 160 is fine. 1959: the first people to put a number on it are not doctors. They are life insurers, pricing the policy. 1977: the first national committee sits. Treat the bottom number at 105. Below that, use judgement. 1993: the line is redrawn at 140 over 90. 1997: a new shelf appears above normal, called high-normal, and a new floor below it, called optimal, at 120 over 80. 2003: high-normal is renamed prehypertension. 120 over 80 is now a condition. The report says in the same paragraph that it is not a disease and needs no drugs. The disclosures at the foot of the paper list the companies that make the drugs it does not need yet. 2014: the same committee's successor raises the line for the over-60s to 150 over 90. Too many old people on too many pills, it says. 2015: a trial called SPRINT measures blood pressure with an automated cuff in an empty room, a method that reads lower than any nurse in any clinic, and finds lower is better. 2017: on the strength of it, the line drops to 130 over 80 for everyone, including the over-60s the 2014 line had just let off. 31 million Americans go to bed healthy and wake up hypertensive. Prevalence goes from 32% to 46% overnight, and under 45 it doubles. 2019: Britain reads the same trial and keeps 140 over 90, 150 for the over-80s, on the grounds that the lower lines had not been shown to prevent a single event. 2026: the same arm, the same cuff, the same reading of 132 over 84. A patient in Ohio. A well woman in Chester. The Atlantic is the diagnosis. 31 million customers, created in one afternoon, by a vote, and not one of them was measured. Their arteries did not move. The committee did. A President was healthy at 186. You are a patient at 130. The only organ that changed in 80 years is the one that holds the meeting.