About Us
We’re starting Hopeformentalillness.com for the purpose of educating and encouraging folks with mental illness in their world. No matter where I look I see the same alarming numbers. The world is changing and mental health is suffering. Of course Covid with all the lockdowns hasn’t helped. We have experienced a 20% increase of use in the U.S. of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds. According to the CDC 2/3 of adults in the U.S. are overweight/obese and there are worldwide 322 million people suffering from depression. There is a direct correlation between the two and that is something we will be addressing. Just look around us; at the supermarket or our favorite restaurant and we can see the problem. What comes first? No matter; depression can lead to obesity and obesity can definitely lead to depression. Worldwide 300 million people suffer from PTSD including 30.6% of those affected by mass conflict. 164 million suffer from substance abuse; OUD (opioid use disorder) has risen 493% in the U.S. alone between 2010 and 2016 and 115 people die every day from opioid abuse; we haven’t even touched on alcoholism, another substance abuse.
This overweight/depression crisis is something we can address and will. The pandemic has made folks a lot more interested in strengthening their immune system and there are solutions there too. What about the cost of depression to the world economy? 2.5 trillion in 2016 and estimated by the World Economic Foundation to reach 6 trillion by 2030.
Now what about this HOPE? Since a breakthrough study at John’s Hopkins University on Psychedelic (Psilocybin) Mushrooms it is now being widely studied for its potential to treat depression, anxiety, PTSD and many other mental health conditions. Studies at prestigious institutions; Yale School of Medicine, New York’s Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, London’s Imperial College of Science technology and Medicine, University of California San Diego and many others. I will be providing updates on this progress as it develops. There are some very fine companies working on this research and its very promising. You see we’re talking about medicine from nature and Big Pharma can’t patent that which God has provided so they’ve kinda let the mental illness community down for years; hopefully that will change and I’ll keep you posted.
I learned about this from an investment Guru and I bought a few hundred dollars worth of stock in a couple companies. The reason it caught my interest and prompted me to start this is because I’ve lived with mental illness. I lost my wife to Bi-Polar disease ten years ago. Guess what the cause of death was? Years of use of heavy psychotropic drugs; that’s right, Big Pharma’s answer to her disease. That’s why I want to be part of this in some small way. She left a book of poems by “a rapid cycler manic-depressive” called Waves of Emotion; Maybe I’ll share a couple of her poems another time. When she showed her doctor her manuscript he told her that he understood his patients better than ever before and this Dr. DeSilva was probably the foremost authority in the country on Bi-Polar disease. Depression? I’ll tell you about a depression so severe that it took electric shock to save her life; another time.
