THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MOOD CURE: WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED SINCE
When The Mood Cure was first published, my clinic had already been successfully eradicating 40 different negative mood states for 20 years! These were the symptoms of neurotransmitter deficiency and hypoglycemia described in The Mood Cure.
Since then, we’ve kept learning about how to better provide amino acid therapy and about how to tailor the right diet for each client (and how to help them digest it!) We’ve also discovered some new aminos and other nutrients to add to our precious therapeutic collection: For example, the phosphorylated form of Serine for severe insomnia and GABA’s use for ADD.
But we never expected to be confronted by a whole new kind of negative mood state that we’d never seen before and had no tools to correct!
FACING THE NEW MOOD STATES: WHERE DID THEY COME FROM AND WHERE DID WE FIND SOLUTIONS?
Most adults and children are now being wracked by mood-related problems that were unheard of when I went to graduate school in clinical psychology in the 1970s.
Starting in 1985, when we discovered amino acid therapy, we were able to correct most of the early problems. But, in 2007, we began seeing people with problems that the aminos could not completely eliminate.
It took us five years to recognize that we had entered a new mood disorder era, one caused by 30 years of a completely new form of malnutrition. In the 1970s we had unknowingly started to be uprooted from the traditional animal – and plant-centered diets that had provided us with stable mood, health, and weight for millennia. Instead, we had started to consume ultra-processed food high in calories but 60% nutrient void.
Before 1970, several kinds of mental illness, most with clear genetic roots, had been identified in very small percentages of the population. But, when our new diet began to impair our brain functions and our genetic programming, several new forms of these mental problems started to become commonplace.
I’ve already written about the genetic condition, Pyroluria, which we encountered in the 1990s, when one in 20 clients was suffering from it. Now, about half of our current clients have Pyroluria. Fortunately, the remedy for Pyroluria was simple and well-identified early on.
But, in 2010, we encountered a second, entirely new, mood problem, a subclinical form of bipolar disorder, that has since become so common that almost half of our clients now suffer from it (often in addition to Pyroluria and many of the 40 symptoms of neurotransmitter deficiency). We call it the mood swing spectrum???
Although these new clients were functioning pretty well at work, in school, and in relationship, they were typically plagued by daily bouts of unexplainable moods like irritability and anxiety and their family trees almost always contained a family member who had experienced severe bipolar symptoms, typically suicidality.
We eventually created a new symptom questionnaire that has been very helpful in identifying this new syndrome. At the same time, we began to look beyond the aminos for additional solutions. As we begin to see that 80% of our mood swingers also suffered from Pyroluria, we began to establish an effective protocol. We combined the two nutrients needed to eliminate Pyroluria symptoms and recommended OTC or prescription forms of lithium. Of course we have always added whatever aminos were appropriate. This approach typically relieves all of the problematic symptoms very quickly!
Read more about all of this in my new e-book THE MOOD SWING SPECTRUM: SUCCESSFULLY ADDRESSING NEW FORMS OF BI-POLAR DISORDER
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