Hormone Imbalance and Mental Health: The Hidden Connection Explained

Hormones can have a profound impact on mental health, influencing everything from mood, anxiety, and sleep to depression, agitation, and more severe psychiatric symptoms.

In this episode, Dr. Alice Lee and Emily explore the hidden connection between hormone imbalance and mental health from a holistic psychiatry perspective. They discuss how estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, neurotransmitters, inflammation, gut health, liver function, and detoxification pathways may all interact and affect emotional and psychological well-being.

Emily also shares her personal journey with endometriosis, chronic pain, inflammation, psychiatric medication withdrawal, and the process of understanding how hormonal health can influence both physical and mental symptoms.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

• How hormone imbalance may affect mental health
• The relationship between hormones and neurotransmitters
• Estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and mood
• Hormonal changes and anxiety, depression, mania, and psychosis
• Endometriosis, chronic inflammation, and mental well-being
• Gut health, liver function, and hormone metabolism
• The connection between stress, trauma, and hormonal regulation
• Endocrine disruptors and everyday environmental exposures
• Diet, inflammation, and holistic approaches to health
• Looking for underlying causes instead of focusing only on symptoms

Dr. Lee also shares clinical observations that led her to look more closely at hormonal health in patients experiencing significant changes in psychiatric symptoms.

This conversation highlights an important idea: mental health does not exist separately from the rest of the body. Hormones, the nervous system, immune function, inflammation, gut health, and physical wellbeing can all be deeply interconnected.

Whether you are dealing with hormone imbalance, anxiety, depression, endometriosis, chronic inflammation, or simply want to better understand the relationship between hormones and the brain, this episode offers a thought provoking holistic perspective.

Learn more about Dr. Alice Lee and explore additional holistic psychiatry articles, podcasts, and resources at holisticpsychiatrist.com.

If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the podcast, leave a five-star rating, and share it with someone who may find this conversation helpful. Thank you for your support! I really appreciate it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello everyone. This is Dr. Alice Lee. I'm a holistic psychiatrist practicing in Stanford, Connecticut. And today we're going to create a podcast with my colleague, Emily, who was a former patient of mine. Today, our topic is on hormones and their impact on mental health. So welcome, Emily, to our podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Hi. Yeah, I think this is a really interesting topic that we're going to have a lot to talk about.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Yeah. For those people who want to learn more about it after our podcast and want to access the podcast, you can always find it on my website, holisticpsychiatrist.com. And it's a huge website. It's in the process of being updated, getting it reconfigured, so it's a lot easier for people to find materials on there. But you'll find a section on podcasts there. You'll also find a section on holistic articles, and you can go there for some of the articles that get sent out every two weeks through through my newsletters. For those of you who want to have my newsletters come directly into your email and my podcast be directly sent to your email, please just subscribe on my website. There's a place where you can subscribe to my newsletter, but also a place where you can subscribe to my new Substack account. So my new Substack account is where I write more personal and more fully kind of oriented articles. It's really all about everything else that is me besides being a holistic psychiatrist. So holistic psychiatry gets to stay my holistic psychiatry website, and my Substack called the Holistic Psychiatrist has all my other opinions. So if you're curious about what my other opinions, both politically and socially, and with regard to life in general, Substack is where you can find all of that. Okay, so let's get started on hormones and their impact on mental health. So why is this important? A lot of times we think mental illness is all about neurotransmitters. This is what we're conditioned to think is the underlying cause, just because so many of the medications that are used direct itself on neurotransmitters and their receptors. But a lot of the very powerful medications, for example, for psychosis, affect the histamine, neurotransmitter and receptor area. And histamine is all about the immune system, inflammation, those kinds of things. So it gives us a clue that the immune system has a lot to do with mental health conditions. And today we're going to talk about hormones and their impact on mental health. I feel like it has a huge impact on mental illness. I also am learning a lot more about it more recently, and that's why I wanted to do a podcast on it, because it motivates me to be a better teacher. And in order for me to be a better teacher, I have to learn more about it. So, Emily, why don't we have you share some of your insights on hormones?

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. I think that we, I know you told me you have a more recent experience, which I haven't heard yet, so I'm excited to hear that. But I when I was working with you as a patient, I was also trying to come off psychiatric medications. I was also at the same time dealing with endometriosis. So a lot of what I was finding dealing with endometriosis, we would incorporate into my regimen and the different work we were doing. I was walking both of those paths at the same time, learning about mental health, psychiatric medications, and withdrawal, and also hormonal health, gut health, which coincides with both. It all comes together in one big circle. But yeah, so that's really my experience with it. And it's been a long journey with endometriosis, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

Yes. As you're talking about it, the word silos come to mind. That currently with medicine, everything is siloed in different kinds of like specialties. So I remember when you first started working with me and everything, I did eventually refer you to a holistic OBGYN, hoping that the holistic doctor will help you to deal with endometriosis and everything. And so that's how I was taught. They're the specialists. So I shouldn't be like trying to do something that I'm not specialized in. But as a holistic psychiatrist, sometimes we're forced out of our comfortable silos. And I think you did that for me when it came to hormones.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

I remember a conversation we had. I don't remember what was said verbatim, but there was something along the lines of this is not my specialty. I think we were at that point, it was just energy work because I was still working with that holistic OBGYN, but I was starting to have my doubts working with them. And I remember you saying something along the lines of this isn't my specialty, but we'll give it a shot. And it started with just energy work. And then just from there, we're during those sessions, we were both sitting on our computers just doing research, discussing different things. Oh, what about this? And then we're both sitting there Googling, trying to find answers. But I think it's the way I think it should be when you're working with, and I've I found other practitioners like that since then that will sit back with you and say, okay, I'm not too familiar. Let me see how this connects and this connects, because it is just, I have been amazed to be able to go back to my childhood, like very young, and just connect everything to my mental health, like all the health issues I had, just it's it's all connected.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Yeah. And another thing that comes to mind as we're talking about this, like it's it takes a weight off people's shoulders when they start to find actual answers of underlying causes for their mental health symptoms, because mental health symptoms is so abstract. And if you don't know the underlying causes, then there's a lot of guilt and sense of stigma associated with it. But if you start to understand the underlying causes, there's no shame or stigma associated with it because you're starting to be able to, number one, feel empowered, and number two, you're going to be able to make inroads in a problem and be able to change how things are going to affect your body in that way, right? So instead of thinking I'm a weak-wheeled person or I can't do this or that, it's more like let's roll up our sleeves and do something about it.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm really curious because I think that your recent experience was what sparked the idea to do this topic for this podcast. So I'm really curious to know what it was.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Knowing how I talk so much, I will try to make it succinct. But, anyways, yeah, I had this really interesting patient. She's fairly new to my practice. So I would say maybe I've been working with her for about a month, maybe a little bit more than a month. So that's beyond the evaluation phase. Evaluation sometimes takes almost two weeks because I'm doing three evaluation appointments and each of them are two hours long. So, anyways, I've really only worked with her about a month in terms of having her take supplements and everything. But she was in the hospital and she got discharged, and then she came to see me when she was in the hospital, and the mother noticed that she was psychotic and manic. She wasn't able to be lucid until she had her period. And then when her period came, all of a sudden she was like her symptoms went away. And I was like, oh, okay, so hormones had a lot to do with it. But I didn't know how quickly I had to hop on to a very urgent need to understand how to fix her hormones because when she came out of the hospital, she was on two very powerful medications in rather healthy doses, too. Like Alanzepine is a very powerful antisector, and she was on lemictyl, which is a mood stabilizer. The mood stabilizer one was just in the beginning stages, it was only 25 milligrams. But lanzepine, she was on 12.5 milligrams total. She was taking five milligrams in the morning, 7.5 milligrams at night. And if a normal person were to take that, you'd be sleeping 24 hours. It's enough tranquilization to knock you out. But, anyways, so I felt somewhat secure that I had some time to work with this patient because she had all these strong medications and I put her on some supplements. But lo and behold, about 10 days before her period was about to come, she went from being over-medicated and feeling very sleepy to becoming fully manic, psychotic, agitated, insomnia became severe, she couldn't sleep at all. So we had worked enough. She'd been on, she's been taking some supplements and everything, and she was on a hefty dose of medication. So I had two choices. Either she goes in the hospital and they pile on more medications until she's not able to think. Therefore, symptoms will stop because she won't be able to think. Or I can start to dig a little deeper and see what's going on using my energy testing data to figure out how to help her in an outpatient basis. So given the psych history, I started looking at her hormones using my energy testing criteria. And I discovered that the metabolites of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone were not being cleared properly. Now, there were a lot of different reasons why this was happening. She had toxicity problems, she has infection problems, and probably a good deal of genetic problems as well. So, with all of those three reasons combined together, I think it really had an impact on enzymes and detoxification and everything. So when her period comes up and she's starting to make more of these reproductive hormones, they were going up normally, but they weren't being cleared normally, and they were starting to accumulate. And she was having psychotic symptoms. That was the hypothesis, but I didn't know for sure. But I did some digging, found some supplements. One of the key supplements I added was called dim D-I-M, diendyl methane. That's what it was. So I started using DIM, and I also used Magnolia bark because it's also it kind of calms down the adrenals. And we added that and everything. And then she came in to do some energy work. And when she did the energy work, I worked on her enzymes and her genetics and detoxification pathways. So it turned out she didn't immediately get better in my session. But that after that session with the energy work and after the mother received these helpful functional medicine supports, she regained her, meaning she was able to sleep all through the night and her mind cleared up. Although it's interesting, she still hasn't gotten her period yet. So you'd think that you will get your period and then you become lucid. But I think what happened was that between the functional medicine and the energy medicine, she was able to get on top of things. So what I saw with the DIM DIM is that her metabolites, the hormone methods, went from 200. My scales went from zero to 200 is excessive and it's really bad. 100 is optimal and zero is not at all. And she was at 200 with the estrogen metabolites, the progesterone metabolites, and the testosterone metabolites. So she was manic, she was psychotic, and she was aggressive, very aggressive. So with the dim, I saw it go from 200 to three after a couple of days, and then I think it just continued to go down. So once I saw it go from 200 to 140, I knew that she was moving in the right direction. And I would say within a couple of days, her mental health stabilized. So from that experience, that was like the final cherry on top, because I've had many experiences where people with hormonal issues would describe their problems. And I knew that if people release too much adrenaline and they have these adrenal metabolites that would not be cleared properly, that they would also have anxiety, a lot of anxiety, panic attacks, even psychosis. And so between my understanding of adrenaline, my understanding of these hormones, and some of the history or empirical experiences I've had with patients, all of a sudden it finally made a difference for me. Where before it was like hormones, yes, they're important, and yes, I have a questionnaire that checks everybody's hormones, but it wasn't like, wow, hormones, I really need to focus on these hormones. And you'd think that I would know that by now because I worked with you on your hormones. But your hormones caused you a lot of pain and maybe some depression, but I still had the toxins, detoxification, genetics, neurotransmitter kind of mentality. It didn't include that very important aspect of hormones.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Well, and I wonder if it's because endometriosis caused so much pain for me. That really was our primary focus. That was pain management essentially through working on hormones. We dug, we did a lot of reading both on our own, and then during sessions, like I had mentioned, it was trying to find the source of the pain, I think, rather than connecting it to everything else that had gone on because I had successfully already overcome so much in terms of my mental health, obviously, this the medication withdrawal.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Yeah. Which also tells us hormones can show up in different ways with different symptoms. Absolutely. Yeah. And I don't think I fully understood the level of your pain. And I don't think you fully felt seen until they found the fibroid and it was so big. And I was thinking, you were experiencing the pain that was probably equivalent of giving birth once a month. How women would experience as the body is trying to get rid of something in the uterus.

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Yeah, so the that's when I was finally officially diagnosed with endometriosis. I had started seeing an OBGYN at 13 years old, which is a crazy experience. Looking back on it now, I recognize that it was also traumatic because I was having vaginal oldness at 13, 14, 15 years old. And I have been told since that age, I'm 38 now, that I probably had endometriosis. So it was always birth control painkillers. So those were my options. You had a lot of NSAIDs. A lot. So much. It's just constant. Yeah, I would rotate a leaf, advil, and Tylenol so that I could be taking something around the clock. My pain was bad as a child, teenager, and it progressively just got worse and worse to the point where I was going to the ER anywhere from one to four or five times a year, just depending on how bad things were. I finally went to see a new OBGYN after a visit. And I had been told for months that I had a fibroid at the ER, and they're like, don't worry about it. It's probably just your endometriosis. And she said, No, this fibroid is huge. Like it's taking up your whole cervical cavity. But yeah, it was through that surgery that she knew going in. She was certain that I had endometriosis. But yeah, the pain was very extreme, obviously putting me in the ear, spending nights on the bathroom floor. I don't have children of my own, but I have read accounts, people comparing it to birth, plenty of women saying they would rather give birth than deal with the pain. And it's all hormone related, which is just absolutely crazy. And we have, I think, a lot of different things to talk about here. I made some notes while you were talking. I also made some notes beforehand. So if people watching see me looking down here or looking over here, that's where I'm looking.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

But I'd love to hear what you want to share about endometriosis, inflammation, and its connection to psychiatric presentations.

unknown 16:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Yeah, so the very condensed version of my whole health journey, I think, from childhood to where I am now. I had a lot of ear infections and strep throat as a child. Pretty constant. Lots of antibiotics, sometimes two or three times a month. We know how much that can mess up the gut. Then start having pain with the endometriosis starting around 11, 12, 13 years old. With that endometriosis, what I didn't understand really until the last year was that endometriosis is not just a gynecological disease, it is a full-body inflammatory disease. And it's officially been classified that way, finally, which was a big win for the endometriosis community. But with that, if you think about your body just constantly in a state of inflammation and the cascade of other problems that can create, my entire life I have considered myself a lazy person, even after I overcame the mental health issues, which again connect all the way back to that, which I'll circle back around to, and now had surgery. This is about two and a half months out of excision surgery with an endometriosis specialist, which was extremely validating to learn my organs were fused together. I had to have a bowel resection, they cut out part of my intestines because it was fused with my appendix and my ovary. But if you think about that kind of full-body inflammation and it's your baseline your entire life, that's just your normal, feeling exhausted, feeling like your body, I always described it as like I just feel like I got hit by a truck, not I was sore, like my joints just felt inflamed. I was the exhaustion is I call it bone-deep exhaustion. It was just absolutely unreal, but I always chalked it up to being lazy because it's what I dealt with since I was a preteen. And it's what my teachers saw, and it's what my parents sometimes saw. We had no idea what was going on underneath. And it is a vicious cycle, and there's a lot that goes into it. Those detox pathways we were talking about, issues with gut permanent and dysbiosis from the years of antibiotics. So it's just around and around that cycle.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

And maybe we could help our audience understand a little bit about the in because we had to take a look at that too with our hormone podcast. But what we now understand is that the gut, the liver, detoxification, and the hormonal issues are all interconnected because the GI system has to get rid of these metabolites. The liver has to be well in order to create and metabolize hormones. Your genes have to be able to methylate and provide all of the different nutrients that you need in order to have hormonal balance. There was one product that we did not know very much about besides DIM that kept coming up as we were reading a little bit about hormones, and that was calcium deglucurate. And apparently that's also very helpful for hormonal balance, and it's something that I think we should be talking about as well. One of the things that we learned about balancing hormones was besides dim, was calcium deglucurate.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

So maybe you can talk a little bit about the connection between hormones and neurotransmitter.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

Okay. So I think that there are things that can help detox those hormones, and much about how that works in terms of issues outside of my own. But I know that endometriosis is a great example because it's typically considered an issue with estrogen dominance. So the body doesn't, it's not that it produces too much estrogen necessarily, it's that your body doesn't detox it properly, and that estrogen has nowhere to go. So it essentially starts creating lesions outside of the uterus, ovaries, like I said, it ended up all over my abdominal cavity. Then in turn, those lesions are essentially their own little estrogen factories. They can create their own estrogen. So it's just this endless cycle. But beyond that, when estrogen is out of balance, so are your other hormones. It's often why you'll see, and don't quote me on this, not an MD, but I do believe that from the reading that I've done, progesterone is often prescribed to take kind of the second half of your cycle to help balance out, you need proper estrogen production to help balance out estrogen. And this is where I'm going to be looking down. I have some notes, but it's interesting going back to your patient that you were talking about. You said it was about 10 days before her period was supposed to start. And I've read a lot of accounts in different groups, like the acadesia groups, especially that for women, they're asking, does it get worse before you start your period or while you're on your period? And your cycle is supposed to have this certain flow of hormones. And I know estrogen directly affects serotonin production, it affects your dopamine, your GABA. In my case, it changes your pain sensitivity. Progesterone is a metabolite that acts on GABA receptors. Falling progesterone can contribute to anxiety. And I think it's your progrone starts to fall, is it right before your period starts? I think. Again, don't quote me on it. And then those also affect your thyroid hormones, your cortisol hormones. So when we go back to how hormones affecting mental health, it's They're not separate from our neurotransmitters. They're upstream regulators, essentially, right? Is that how you would describe them?

SPEAKER_01 22:07

My understanding of hormones is, I think, too superficial at this point for me to say yay or nay to that. But definitely. I think of hormones and neurotransmitters as being brothers and sisters. They go together. But I also think of hormones as being slower in the healing process, at least the patients that I've worked with. So neurotransmitters, they change and can be modulated within seconds. Your thoughts can change your neurotransmitters. But hormones, I think of them as cyclic that extend over a month and it has a certain cycle to them. It's a little bit more complex. But what I see is that if a person is to remain or maintain well-being, both the hormones and the neurotransmitters need to be healed before they fully feel very stable after they, let's say, come off medications. Yeah, what I'm seeing right now is that they still have, let's say, about 10% or 20% lag in healing when it comes to hormones versus neurotransmitters. So by the time they're able to come off these neurotransmitter-based medications, there's still a little bit left for the hormones in terms of healing that I see with my patients. But some of these medications also affect hormones. So that was another of the podcasts that I've created where I learned a lot about SSRIs and their direct effects on the hypothalamus, which then have a downstream effect on all of the hormones throughout the body. Appetite, sleep, those kind of things. Right. I've always understood from just reading some of the stuff by Abram Hofer and everything that vitamin B3 had an impact on the whole, which is a waste product of adrenaline, that whole metabolic process. But at this point, I'm looking at it more deeply in terms of what kind of things need to be done to help with the metabolism, the proper metabolism of adrenaline. And it goes back to our big organs, like the liver, the GI system, and making sure that the liver works properly and the GI system works properly. Some of the things that undermine the GI system, for example, would be like antibiotics. But other things that people don't think about is swimming. If you're exposed to bleach, chlorine in the water a lot, and you swallow that into your GI system, it can really alter the microbiome.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

I never thought about that. Even your skin absorbing it too, right? Yes. I never thought about that.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

Yeah. So some people were that I've worked with who had severe GI problems were professional swimmers. They competed. Yeah. Maybe throughout high school or something. So they were in the water, chlorinated water, for hours and hours every day.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Yeah. That was me growing up as well. So we never discussed that. So I wasn't a competitive swimmer, but I sway all summer long. That's I spent all summer long as a kid at the pool, the neighborhood pool. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

Yeah, that that can definitely affect the microbiome.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

So I think we covered some of the ways in which hormones can become dysregulated. One of the things that come to mind that I think would be helpful, not that we have the final answer to everything, is that I think there are hormone responses to trauma. Yeah. Sexual abuse or any kind of abuse that might cause severe anxiety with regard to one's sexuality, I think, can have an emotional impact and on our body, the way it develops. And I think it's something for us to consider having an impact on the biology of our hormones as well.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Yeah, even toxic abusive upbringing, relationships, race. I wonder how much influence those stress hormones have on the production of everything else. We keep saying it's just all, it's all connected, it's all cyclical.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

Yeah, actually, there were some research that I ran across in the past that talked about abuse and its later impact on people's mental health and depression and anxiety and has a very huge impact on that. And therefore, you would think that abuse, perhaps even neglect, sometimes it's harder to measure that, will have a way of raising the background baseline of adrenaline or the fight or flight stress hormones. And I would imagine that would cause more inflammation and therefore more likelihood for depression, anxiety on a physical level. So sometimes the social events can have a big impact as opposed to sometimes the functional, biological uh underpinnings. So we have to keep our minds open.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Yeah, the more we talk about this, the more you realize how susceptible we are to having hormonal dysregulation. We live in a world where it's becoming more and more stressful. You have to be quite proactive, I think, to create a life that you can bring that stress down. And I think it's really important to do. I don't think we've touched on this yet. We live in a world full of endocrine disruptors.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Just think yourself lucky though, because you're aware of it and you can do something about it over time, right? Absolutely. And you mentioned that you choose some different hygiene products. Can you share with us some of the things that kind of decrease exposure to antibiotics?

SPEAKER_00 27:50

Yeah, because we're exposed to it left and right, everything. I think it's even worse for women. And like I was telling you, in our makeup, our hair products, everything, our skin absorbs everything we put on it. All these synthetic materials, synthetic perfumes, everything are endocrines, they disrupt your hormone production and cause an imbalance. So it's hard because if you want to lead a no-tox life, you're pretty much replacing everything, even your clothing, polyesters, synthetic fibers, when you're sweating, it's going into your skin. And I spent some time trying to just do a complete overhaul in my life, and I've attempted a couple times and it doesn't work. It just becomes stressful. It's also depressing. For me, it was very depressing because I'm thinking I'm never gonna be able to do it. So I started focusing on a few things at a time, and it feels good because I am able to fully replace. So it started honestly with my not my dishwasher detergent, which I have replaced, my laundry detergent. Replace that, my dishwashing detergent, my shampoos, my lotions, the things I put on my body. Not trying to replace my whole closet, but when I do go shopping, I look for 100% cotton, linen, natural fibers as much as I can.

SPEAKER_01 28:59

Curious what kind of brands are helpful for shampoos and body washes and those kind of things?

SPEAKER_00 29:07

I typically, if I can't find something in the grocery store, which I shop at Sprouts, which is like a Whole Foods place, but I look at the ingredient list. There's different apps you can use where you can take pictures of the ingredient list or of the barcode, and it'll tell you is it low toxicity, no toxicity, it'll give it a rating. What apps are those? I wish I could remember them off the top head. I don't, or just a simple Google search. Okay. Low tox, no tox shampoos. Generally, when I'm buying shampoos, I'm looking at the ingredient lists, and I want to be able to recognize the ingredients. I don't want to be a whole bunch of chemicals I can't pronounce. Now there are things, the shampoo I use now, I think it's a low tox, it's not a no, it's called heritage, spelled H-A-I-R, Heritage. And there's things in it I had to Google, but it's not actually toxic. But you look for things that are like no sulfates, no things like that.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

That's interesting because it tells us sometimes the the grocery stores that you go to can help already select and narrow our choices to a little bit healthier choices, right? Versus some grocery stores may not have any of those healthy choices.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

Oh, depending on the grocery store, grocery store chain. Yeah. Yeah, I'd agree. I think some stores definitely have more options. I think that there has been such a push from the general public that we want these options. I do, I am surprised when I walk into a regular large chain grocery store that sometimes there are more options than I expect. Sometimes there's still no options, at least one or two. Yeah, and I think beyond trying our best, starting with a couple things, that it has to make a difference, even if you're only doing a couple things. It goes back to what we were saying, and what you were starting to talk about was the detox pathways and using different methods to, in my case, detox the excess estrogen or whatever hormones it may be that you have excess of, or trying to balance those hormones, and there's different methods, of course, to do that.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

Yeah. I wanted to go to one topic that might be helpful for the general audience, and that is for a lot of people, they may not know the difference between hormones and neurotransmitters and what we're talking about when we're talking about hormones. So, with hormones, usually the hormones are created by glands, certain organs like the liver, the thyroid, the adrenal. Hormones can be also created in the brain with the pineal, hypothalamus, those kinds of things. So hormones are messengers, just like neurotransmitters, but they oftentimes have cycles during the day when they're high, when they're low. There's a lot of regulation when it comes to hormones, and they tend to take a little bit longer in terms of the way they are affected. Neurotransmitters typically are found in the nervous system. That's why they're neuro or nervous systems, and the nervous system creates neurotransmitters that are also messengers and they bind to neurotransmitter receptors. So hormones also have receptors. The neurotransmitter have receptors. With neurotransmitters, they often get recycled in the receptors like reuptake pumps and things like that. But with neurotransmitters, they happen very quickly. So I think of neurotransmitters as something that modulate our thoughts and our emotions very quickly. But hormones are things that control certain functions, bodily functions, and the happening in the background. But when the hormones are dysregulated, I'm sure the neurotransmitters are affected as well. And if the neurotransmitters are affected, I think the hormones get affected as well. So the two messenger systems are both, they both have equal power in creating mental illness. And the focus almost exclusively on neurotransmitters and everything for psychiatry, I think, is is the silo effect, unfortunately. Yeah, of medicine in general.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Yeah. Yeah. I know that you start with, as you you discussed towards the beginning of the podcast, with your specific testing for hormones. And this is something that you, with your practice, you're gonna start researching more and diving into. And like you said, it has finally clicked. You've always worked on it. For people who aren't working with you and are listening to this podcast, what do you think some good advice for them would be if they want to do their own research, reach out, find people who may be able to help them to discover whether or not they have these hormone imbalances, stuff like that?

SPEAKER_01 33:56

Yeah, that's a really great question because there are many people out there who can help. I think of the actual doctors who are experts in holistic medicine as naturopaths. So they spend many years studying herbals and nutrients and all sorts of biochemical pathways in order to help people heal naturally. So naturopaths, especially naturopaths who own a bioscan machine. These are where you hold a metal rod and it runs electrical current through you that you can't even feel because it's very subtle, and it reads the information in your system. So you can see a naturopath, they can hook you up to their bioscan machine, they can read out what's going on in terms of your hormones and infections and things like that, and start treating underlying causes. Another way would be acupuncture because a lot of activists are also into Chinese medicine. They know about herbals, they know about energy medicine in terms of acupuncture, and I think they can be very helpful in terms of healing underlying causes as well. So for those two types of interventions, the cost would be a lot less because they they don't have to spend 10 years getting their MD degree. It's just a lot less money expenditure. So I think that there's two major things to try to improve. One is the GI system and then the other is the liver. The immune system is also very important. If a person has a lot of chronic inflammation, you have to figure out is it a viral underlying cause? Is there a bacterial infection, strap infection, that kind of underlying causes? Nowadays, COVID would be something to be considering. But sometimes, even with people who have had vaccinations for COVID, what I've seen is that the immune system is very good at controlling the COVID virus, but the other viruses are kind of left to unfortunately increase. And so, like Epstein Bar virus or herpes simplex or even things in the gut that are bacterial like H. pylori, those things that are often very common in the body, can be less well managed because the immune system is focusing so much on the COVID-19 virus. So strengthening your immune system and everything is really important because viruses can have an effect on our thyroid too and cause hyperthyroid or Hashimoto's or any of those things. So, yeah, that's how they can go start making progress in the right areas. Sure. As opposed to using first line treatment, another medication to treat uh from the top down the symptoms. Because you can treat the symptoms and hide the symptoms with psychiatric medications, but the underlying cause, if it's not treated, will get worse if you don't address them or find out what they are.

SPEAKER_00 36:54

Yeah, and you spoke quite a bit about gut health. There's a lot that you've you've talked about in previous podcasts. I know we've talked about since I've been doing these podcasts with you, good ways to do that. But I do think that that's an easy way. Not always easy, it does take some willpower, but starting with inflammation, anti-inflammatory diet. They're these things that don't really carry risks. So cutting out inflammatory foods, we're talking about the endocrine disruptors, they're also in our food. They're in preservatives, they're in just so many ingredients in our food. But if you're eating whole organic food, if you're able, cutting out wheat, dairy, things like that, see if that makes a difference. I think it does for a lot of people, testing out what food sensitivities you can slowly start putting certain foods back in your diet to see what those food sensitivities are. But as you and I have talked about many times, I think you've explained to me that oftentimes food sensitivities are just issues with the gut or immune. Is that correct? Am I remembering correctly, or is it more immune sensitivity to certain foods? Maybe I'm getting it wrong.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

Well, when you can keep up nutritionally, you do get leaky gut. And then the foods that you eat the most often that are hardest to digest will leak through and you will build food sensitivities. That's how it works. Okay. Yeah. Cause rampant inflammation. But yeah, you're right. Very good advice. Inflammation and oxidative stress are the underlying causes of both neurological and psychiatric health problems. So if you can decrease inflammation and oxidative stress, that would be great. And one of the things that can also help with detox would be cruciferous vegetables. So if you look up cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, there's a lot of different cruciferous vegetables that help the liver to work better.

SPEAKER_00 38:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:41

And that can also help with detox. I think we close or finish our podcast. Before we do that, I wonder, is there anything that you wanted to say before we finish up our podcast?

SPEAKER_00 38:52

I don't think so. We covered a lot. I think that it's another thing that no, I think that we covered a lot here. I think there's a lot to think about, a lot for me to even go back and start researching a little bit more for myself as I continue on my endometriosis journey. There's always new stuff to learn. So yeah, I think it was great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:12

I certainly admire all the things that you've learned along your healing journey. You've done a lot of research, I think a lot more about certain things biologically than most doctors, just because you've been motivated to find the answers. I want to share maybe one final thought, and that is rather than thinking of life as being full of different undermining health factors, think of your knowledge as empowering you to decrease stress in lots of different ways now. Now that you know about these things, anything you do decreases stress. And so if there's anything that you can do functionally, take a liver extract to help your liver function better or improve your diet, it's one more chalk line on your chalkboard of something you can do to empower yourself to get better compared to the average person out there who is lacking this information. So there's so many different ways to decrease stress once you have that, once you're armed with the information. So I want you to I want to encourage all of you to provide a positive rating if you like our podcast, to share this with others, and also to visit my website, holisticpsychiatrist.com, and get to know all of the free resources on there, including a lot of the energy medicine techniques that can be super helpful for decreasing inflammation and oxidative stress and help with trauma and all sorts of other problems. So until next time, in a couple weeks, Emily and I will be back with other interesting topics to discuss. And thank you for listening. Bye bye.