From the Desk of Carolyn Dean MD ND
As we have wrapped up the stressful holiday season and have entered 2025, I want to direct your attention to your emotional wellbeing – to your mental health. Depending on where you live in the world, the bleak winters months of January and February can be challenging for people who deal with stress, anxiety and depression. Thus, the term “winter blues” is used to describe people feeling a little more blue and blah at this time of year.
But it’s not just the winter months that I want to help you navigate with more peace and calm in your life, I think it’s time we looked at how the last five years have left an imprint on people’s mental health across the globe.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, people faced stressors every day with financial, job, relationship, and health challenges coming to the surface, being dealt with, and moving forward as best they could. I believe stress accumulates, it just builds up like layers of an onion, so most people continue to feel residual effects of the job loss, divorce or financial crisis, long after the issue has been “resolved”.
But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit with a wave of stress that most people have never seen, felt, or dealt with before. Each of the regular daily stressors that we were experiencing was amplified by having to make life and death decisions about family healthcare and lifestyle and safety. There was little information, and no time to process the circumstances, and few trusted support systems to turn to. People were freaking out!
I know just reading this makes you feel a little uneasy as you remember what it was like to navigate The Covid Years.
The current mental health stats
In The Magnesium Miracle in the late 1990’s, I wrote that the rate of overall depression had doubled since WWII and women’s depression had doubled between 1970 and 1992, skyrocketing the use of psychiatric drugs.
Forbes Health gives a well-referenced, current overview.¹ The information is staggering because society tends to ignore mental health and allows it to be stigmatized.
- 23.1% of U.S. adults experienced a mental health condition in 2022
- In 2022, 32.9% of U.S. adults experienced both a mental health condition and substance abuse
- Approximately 5.2 million veterans experienced a behavioral health condition in 2022
- 33.7% of ages 18 to 25 experience mental health concerns compared to 11.4% for ages 26 to 49 years
- In 2020, suicide was the second leading cause of death for U.S. children ages 10 to 14
- In 2021, 51.7% of U.S. women received mental health services compared to only 40% of men.
I know that these statistics were exacerbated by the Covid lockdown and, like I said earlier, I think many of us haven’t really recovered from this massively stressful event in our lives. So, this is the perfect time for me to write The Complete Guide to Mental Health and give you nutritional and supplement guidance, lifestyle tools, and emotional support to help you thrive in the deeply pressurized environment that you live in right now. I’m going to tell you that “the worst is over” and it’s time to breathe again and reclaim your life, if not your joy!
There is nothing like this book out there!
Lifestyle bloggers and wellness gurus are eager for you to follow their programs to “create a better you in 2025”. Some will focus on guiding you through meditation or exercise, changing your diet or dropping your unhelpful habits.
I want to take things a step further and help you improve your brain health and wellness so that any lifestyle changes you choose to make are built upon the foundation of a healthy brain and strong central nervous system.
Is your brain magnesium deficient?
What if it’s difficult for you to make and keep New Year resolutions because your brain has a deficiency? What if it’s got nothing to do with laziness, procrastination or lack of determination? What if it’s difficult to make positive changes in your life because you have a serious magnesium deficiency which is affecting your brain’s functioning? What if?
From my perspective, when all else has failed, and you continue to find yourself struggling with depression, anxiety, the blues, feeling down – what if we can shift the tides of your wellbeing by making sure that your brain has every one of the nutrients it needs to function at its optimal level?
Sounds like a simple solution to a complex problem.
The public in general, and few doctors, really know what’s going on in the brain. It’s a pretty complex structure connected to all parts of the body that controls thought, memory, emotion, touch, motor skills, vision, breathing, temperature, hunger – every process that regulates our body.² The brain and spinal cord that extends from it, make up the central nervous system, or CNS running from stem to stern.
Because of the complexity, we turn our brains over to the specialists. We’ve also neglected the nutrients that our brain and body absolutely require to function.
Mental health challenges are complex and many, with there being over 200 “mental health disorders” on the books. According to Google AI, there are currently 160 mental health drugs in development.
But we should know by now that pharmaceutical drugs are not the answer. I don’t know how many times someone has told me about the trial and error and horrible side effects they endured as their doctor prescribed one antidepressant after another because they just weren’t helping. Try this one… increase the dose… wean yourself off it and then try this one… increase the dose… into infinity.
This is Your Brain on Magnesium
Your brain is made up of cells, called neurons, which house mitochondria which require magnesium to make energy molecules called ATP-Mg. The brain needs to be fed a lot of magnesium to create energy for the 2 million mitochondria that populate EACH mitochondria! This is in contrast to the heart which houses “just” 5,000 mitochondria. And you know how much I talk about getting enough magnesium to your heart!
Nobody (but me) is talking about addressing the mental health crisis using picometer-sized, stabilized ions of magnesium making your neurons function as God and nature intended.
Just ponder this fact more deeply. If 2 million mitochondria have been placed in each of the estimated 86 billion neurons, that means our brain require A Lot of Energy. After all, that’s what mitochondria do. They produce energy and to make that happen you need a lot of magnesium. I’m predicting that when scientists finally study neurons, mitochondria, and magnesium they are going to be amazed at how vital magnesium is for all brain functions! But you don’t have to wait for science to catch up – you know this fact now and you can act on it.
Reaching out to experts
For my latest book, The Complete Guide to Mental Health I reached out to experts who will provide you with stellar information on “nutritional psychiatry” and a diet that supports mental health. I’ve also included expert advice on affirmations, meditations, prayers and visualizations to support your breathing and breathwork and given you a master class on Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) with directions for tapping and scripts that you can use daily to easily ease and soothe yourself.
Have a Happy New Year and a Happy Brain!
Carolyn Dean MD ND
The Doctor of the Future.
¹https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/mental-health-statistics/
²https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/anatomy-of-the-brain
