What is a Mental Health Condition?

Jul 28

Mental health conditions are disorders that affect your thinking, behavior, and mood. Mental health conditions are different from the normal highs and lows in mood that we all experience at times in our lives. A mood disturbance becomes a mental health condition when it becomes severe or persists long enough to affect your ability to function.

A mental health condition can be extremely challenging to live with. It can create problems in your relationships, your education, and your job performance. It can impair your ability to relate to other people, make you feel alone, and profoundly affect all aspects of your life.

How Common Are Mental Health Conditions?

Mental health conditions are very common. Each year, 19% of American adults experience some form of mental health disorder. 4.1% of American adults suffer from a serious mental illness, and 8.5% live with a diagnosable substance use disorder (1).

Mental health conditions are extremely common in the younger population. 1 in 6 Americans between the ages of 6-17 experience a mental health disorder each year. 50% of all lifetime mental health conditions begin by age 14, and 75% by age 24 (2).

What are Some Different Types of Mental Health Conditions?

There are many recognized mental health conditions. Some of the more common ones include:

Anxiety disorders: people with anxiety disorders respond to environmental stimuli with stress and fear that is out of proportion with the event. These responses can be uncontrollable, and involve both physical and emotional symptoms. Anxiety can be generalized, may produce panic attacks, or involve specific fears or phobias.
Mood disorders: these involve the inability to consistently regulate emotions. People may be severely sad, inappropriately elevated and excessively happy, or fluctuate between extremes of both. These include depression, bipolar disorder, and cyclothymia.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): People with OCD struggle with intrusive obsessive thoughts that cause them to engage in compulsive rituals. People living with OCD know that the fears leading to their compulsions are unreasonable, yet they lack the ability to control them.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): PTSD develops following a traumatic event. It leads to severe anxiety and panic responses when triggered by memories of the event. The stress responses this produces can be disabling, leading to people withdrawing from engagement with their life.

What are the Symptoms of Mental Health Conditions?

There are myriad symptoms of mental health conditions, and these vary between conditions. It is very common for more than one condition to be present, with symptoms overlapping and amplifying each other.

Common symptoms may include:

Extreme sadness or low mood
Persistent worry and dread
Extreme swings between elation and sadness
Excessive sleep, or going without sleep for extended periods of time
Difficulty with attention and focus
Problems with problem solving and planning
Persistent agitation
Difficulty regulating anger
Social withdrawal
Changes in appetite
Difficulty relating to others
Loss of libido, or becoming hypersexual
Magical thinking
Suicidal ideation
Abuse of alcohol or drugs
Vague physical symptoms of pain or fatigue
Inability to cope with the demands of life
Being easily overwhelmed with stress
Deterioration in school or job performance

What Happens in the Brain with Mental Health Conditions?

Brain function changes when people struggle with mental health conditions. As with any other neurological condition, specific pathways and brain regions will show alterations of normal function. These often involve the frontal lobe, the hippocampus, the basal ganglia, the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the thalamus, the brainstem, and aspects of the cerebellum. Depending on the condition some of these pathways may be show decreased activity while others are excessively active. This may reach the point where physical changes in the size of these structures may be appreciated on MRI studies.

Brain function involves activity that is coordinated between distributed networks. Large scale networks are involved in brain processing of information. Disruptions in the function of the default mode and salience networks have been shown to be involved in many different mental health conditions (3).

There are chemical pathways involved in mental health conditions as well. These conditions may be impacted by functional changes in the brain’s ability to make new connections between neurons, or by inflammatory factors. Systems that regulate stress can also be affected. Changes can be seen in chemicals pathways that influence a host of critical cellular processes, including the MAPK, Nrf2, BDNF, and NF-kB systems among others. Over time, changes in these pathways can lead to increased brain inflammation, restriction of blood flow, loss of brain endurance, and ultimately, loss of neurons leading to decreased volume in the involved regions (4).

Changes in neurotransmitter signaling systems are also commonly seen in mental health conditions. These involve chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate, including serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and GABA.

How are Mental Health Conditions Usually Treated?

Conventional psychiatric treatment for mental health conditions involves the use of medications that affect the function of specific neurotransmitters, either singly or in combination. These are often some version of reuptake inhibitors that slow the breakdown of chemical messengers. They may also be mood stabilizers, anti-epileptic medications, or antipsychotics. In most cases, mental health treatment will also involve some form of counseling, or psychotherapy.

How is the NeuroRescue Program Different?

Our approach to mental health conditions is significantly more comprehensive than conventional treatment. Traditional psychiatric care has the unfortunate tendency to reduce complicated mental health conditions to the level of neurotransmitter deficiencies, which does people living with these conditions a disservice. While neurochemistry is obviously an important component of any mental health condition, it is by no means the entire story.

Neurotransmitters are nothing more than chemical messengers that allow neurons and pathways to communicate. A lack of firing in a particular pathway may in some cases involve difficulty in producing neurotransmitters, and medications that slow the breakdown of these neurotransmitters may improve the firing rate of the pathway for a time. It is important to understand that if one pathway in your system has difficulty with a particular neurotransmitter, there are no medications that will target only this pathway. Rather, medications will affect every pathway that uses that neurotransmitter, not just the one that has a problem. The side effects seen from psychiatric medications are often the result of these drugs affecting the entire nervous system, rather than only the pathway in question.

Even when neurotransmitters are indeed the problem, conventional treatment is geared only towards trying to find the specific combination of medications that can help reduce your symptoms. The question of why your neurotransmitter function is not appropriate is rarely ever asked, and even less frequently addressed.

We take a far more comprehensive view of your problem, and attempt to address every aspect of your functional issues.

As an example, in most cases of depression, traditional psychiatric treatment views this as a problem with the neurotransmitter serotonin. The medications traditionally employed are selective serotonin reputable inhibitors, or SSRIs. These include, Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, and several others. These medications do not in and of themselves produce more serotonin. Rather, they function to stop the breakdown of serotonin, so that neurotransmitters can bind to receptors more than once before they are reabsorbed. This can give you some level of increased function in serotonin pathways, but does not address the root cause of your serotonin problem.

Neurotransmitters such as serotonin must be produced from amino acids. Tryptophan is the precursor amino acid that makes serotonin, which you receive from dietary protein. Simply having enough tryptophan in your diet may not be enough, as tryptophan must be transported across the blood-brain barrier before it can be used to make serotonin. Other amino acids compete for binding sites on the enzyme that transports tryptophan into the brain, and high levels of substances such as branched chain amino acids can decrease brain serotonin production (5). This enzyme is also affected by dietary glucose and insulin, and poor blood sugar stability can thus also affect serotonin production (6).

Once inside the brain, the chemical reactions that produce serotonin require a number of different cofactors in order for them to proceed efficiently. Cofactor deficiencies are common in the standard American diet, and often lead to dysregulated serotonin production (7).

Tryptophan can also be metabolized by a number of different neurochemical pathways in the brain, which are under the influence of a variety of different factors. These can include inflammation (8), and the composition of microflora in the gut (9). The dietary and lifestyle factors that lead to changes in these systems are often the primary factors that perpetuate serotonin deficiency and the mental health conditions this creates (10).

Genetics also play a major role in the function of neurotransmitter systems. There are genetic variations in the enzymes that produce serotonin, in the receptors that serotonin binds to, and in the enzymes that break serotonin down. These genetic variations can significantly affect the function of neurotransmitter systems, leading to neuropsychiatric symptoms (11). They can also affect the way that your brain responds to particular psychiatric medications (12). If the genetics of your system are understood, supplementation with the appropriate cofactors to modulate the enzymes in question can often be the key to resolving your symptoms (13).

Even if function in the serotonin system is ideal, people can still struggle with depression. The most generous estimates indicate that at most 50% of people living with major depressive disorder respond to SSRIs (14). This is at least in part based on the fact that depression is not merely a serotonin issue, but a problem of neuroplasticity within specific brain pathways. Problems with frequencies of pathway firing within the medial prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus have been shown to be involved in major depressive disorder (15). There are many different brain pathways involved in depression, and brain lesion studies have shown that injuries to a wide range of regions can result in major depression. A common factor with all of these regions is that they integrate with the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Decreased function of the left DLFPC seems to be a critical feature of major depressive disorder (16). Depression is thus not just about serotonin, but involves all of the different factors that can lead to decreased function in the left DLPFC.

There are a number of specific ways that we can harness neuroplasticity to improve function in the DLPFC. Physical activity has been shown to directly improve frequencies of activation in the brain, such that physical exercise is an extremely effective antidepressant (17). This region is also responsible for the creation of a specific class of eye movements known as anti-saccades. Anti-saccades have been demonstrated to be impaired in major depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders (18). Direct rehabilitation of these and other eye movements have been shown to improve a wide range of neuropsychiatric conditions, including major depression (19). Direct stimulation of the DLPFC using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation has been shown to significantly improve and even resolve symptoms in major depressive disorder, particularly in people that do not respond to antidepressant medications (20).

Even if we view depression as a problem with activity of the DLPFC, we must still ask why this system is not firing appropriately. The DLPFC functions within a number of discrete brain networks. Many remote brain regions and pathways integrate with this system, and problems in these remote areas may lead to dysfunctional rates of DLPFC firing. In many cases, problems with the DLPFC are the result of previous concussions and mild traumatic brain injuries, which may have occurred long ago (21). In other cases, this dysfunction may be related to impaired inputs from other pathways, resulting from problems with the cerebellum (22), or the vestibular system (23). In order to properly address impairment in this system, we need to evaluate the entirety of the brain across a number of functional domains.

Is the NeuroRescue Program a Substitute for Psychiatric Care?

No. Psychiatric care is part of your NeuroRescue Program. We have an experienced psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner as part of our clinical care team. We strongly encourage that people under our care with mental health conditions are comanaged by psychiatric providers, and will integrate our care with the rest of your team. We will provide you with appropriate referrals if needed. We make sure that you are, above all else, safe and secure as you work through your NeuroRescue therapy.

How Does the NeuroRescue Program Work?

We design your unique NeuroRescue Program to be among the most comprehensive diagnostic and therapeutic protocols available today. We create individual NeuroRescue Programs based on a comprehensive analysis of every relevant neurological system and pathway, using gold-standard, cutting edge neurodiagnostic technologies and examination procedures and state-of-the-art therapies.

We begin with your Discovery Day, wherein we perform a comprehensive history of not only your condition, but your life on a timeline. This allows us to dive deeply into your case and see all of the factors that led to where you are now. It helps us uncover hidden problems and associated conditions that may be making it difficult for you to move your recovery forward.

Our examination allows us to identify the areas and pathways of your brain that have been impacted by your mental health condition. We begin by precisely quantifying the function of your visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems through computerized analysis of your eye movements, your inner ear reflexes, and your balance in a host of different sensory conditions.

We employ technologies including Videooculography and Saccadometry to measure several classes of eye movements. We use Video Head Impulse Testing to measure the function of your inner ear, and Computerized Dynamic Posturography to assess your balance in different sensory conditions.

We use NeuroSensoryMotor Integration testing to evaluate hand-eye coordination and cognition, and Virtualis testing to assess dynamic eye tracking and perception of vertical in a virtual reality environment.

We combine all of this with a comprehensive physical and neurological examination of your sensory, motor, autonomic, and cognitive systems. We review any relevant laboratory testing, radiological imaging, and prior neurodiagnostic testing, and integrate that information with our findings.

We use this information to identify which parts of your brain are working properly, which systems are struggling, and the precise point at which your systems fatigue.

We can then design a NeuroRescue Program that is unique and specific to your brain, and yours alone. Your NeuroRescue Program works to rejuvenate and reintegrate the damaged neurons and pathways in your brain. It works to improve energy, endurance, and functional capacity within your fragile systems.

All of our therapies are backed by the latest neuroscience research. Our therapies may involve eye exercises designed to improve gaze stability, or the ability to successfully hit targets with your eyes (28). They may involve exercises to restore reflexes involving your inner ear, your neck, or both (27). They may include exercises to improve your balance under specific conditions (29). They may involve vision training exercises using specific therapies that integrate several modalities at the same time. They may involve photobiomodulation strategies using low-level laser and LED therapies (30). They may involve things like specific types of electrical stimulation (24), transcranial magnetic stimulation (25), or even specific exercises performed in a virtual reality environment (31). Research shows that taking a multimodal functional neurological approach to treating neurological conditions is extremely effective, and that the effects are lasting (27).

We use our technologies and procedures to not only see what we need to address, but also when it is time to stop and let you rest. We address your impaired neurological function from multiple angles of therapy, and provide metabolic support to improve neurological recovery.

While we cannot bring back neurons that have been lost, your NeuroRescue Program allows us to take the pathways that remain and maximize their efficiency and endurance. And by focusing on the integration of systems, we can do more than just get pathways working better, we can get them working together again. This gives us our best opportunity to return you to living a healthy, vibrant, and fulfilling life.