Alternative Solutions For Mental Health Beyond Medication

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we are talking about mental health, specifically all the things that aren’t typically focused on in traditional mental health evaluation and treatment, but should be. My guest Brendan Vermeire is a good friend and valued colleague of mine, and his personal story and professional work is going to be so empowering for you to hear about. We are going to cover the big picture of what needs to change to better meet the needs of kids and adults with mental health symptoms, and we are also going to dive into some specifics related to things like the gut-brain connection, braincell health and more. But before we get to all of that, let me tell you a little bit about Brendan. He’s a mental and metabolic health scientist and researcher, functional medicine educator, writer and speaker. He’s a board-certified holistic health practitioner, master nutrition coach, personal trainer, and CrossFit trainer. He’s the proud owner and founder of The Metabolic Solutions Institute for Functional Health and Fitness Practitioners, and the Metabolic Solutions Research and Education Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to changing the way the world views mental health through advancing the science of mental health dysfunction. He’s also the creator of The Mental Map, which is a cutting-edge lab panel for mental health. I’m so thrilled to have Brendan with us today. Thanks for being here, friend. Welcome to the show!

Brendan Vermiere

Thanks for having me, Nicole, it’s so good to see you again. I feel so spoiled that we have gotten so much quality time together while we are both in our Airbnb’s in Arizona. So it’s really a pleasure to be here.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That’s true. For our listeners, I have been spending the month of February getting out of the cold in Michigan and in Arizona, and Brendan and I were here for some work things, and have gotten to spend some time together in person. So it’s been great. And the sunshine doesn’t hurt either, from a mental health standpoint, of course, right? It’s like, oh, yeah, mental health, sunshine is a good thing. I would actually love to start by having you share a bit of your story of how you even came to be in the world of mental health. I mean, you’ve been trained in fitness and all those things, but I know that the mental health piece is really grounded in your own personal experience. So I’d love for you to share with listeners your story and how it brought you to the work that you’re doing today.

Brendan Vermiere

Yeah, absolutely, Nicole. It would be a pleasure to share. I’m really an open book on that subject because I think a lot of people can relate and resonate with some of the struggles that I went through. So obviously, it really is the story of my entire life, but to kind of give a cliff-notes sort of synopsis overview of some of the major events that happened, I think starting from the beginning where I was first put on the psychiatric drug at the age of 17. So I was in high school, I think it was my senior year and I was just doing a physical to participate in sports, and my primary care physician put me on Zoloft, and I don’t remember exactly why. I think I mentioned something about Seasonal Affective Disorder because it was wrestling season coming up, and darkness and winter, and I always get kind of sad, kind of blue in the winter. So there was no blood work of any kind done, no referral to a mental health professional. Just “Here you go kid, here’s Zoloft”, right? And hey, I’m just a kid, I’m doing what my doctor tells me to do, and the Zoloft made me feel worse, a lot of Anhedonia and apathy and just kind of felt like a spaced-out zombie. And that was when I was 17, and over the years — which obviously 17 to 21, 22, those are very critical neurodevelopmental and psychologically developmental years as you’re going from childhood to adulthood, and trying to figure out your life plans of “Do I go to college, or do I actually joined the Navy for the SEAL program?” And it was actually, I was in boot camp and they found I had preexisting injuries so I was medically discharged. And that really felt like that was my life goal, my life plan that just got ripped away from me due to circumstances I had no control of. So here I am 18, 19, I’m working at the gym, scrubbing toilets, folding towels, and doing janitorial work. My mental health just started getting worse, to be honest. And I did eventually move on because I needed something to focus my intense kind of obsessive personality towards, so that’s when I got certified as a trainer and nutrition coach, because I was always very passionate about health and fitness nutrition. And I got started with that career, which in many ways kind of saved me.

But in the early stages, my mental health continued to decline, and so when I was about 20, 21, I found myself in front of the same primary care, and this time it was like, “Oh, well, Zoloft didn’t work. So here’s Wellbutrin. Let’s see if a dopamine drug works better”, then same idea, but this time four years later, he did refer me to a psychiatry clinical psychology clinic, and so I underwent a battery of subjective computer assessments to test for attention time and focus and personality quizzes, and ultimately was diagnosed with ADHD and Major Depressive Disorder. And so then they put me on Vyvanse and Adderall on top of the Wellbutrin, and referred me to work with a therapist, but it was actually two weeks later that I woke up in the intensive care unit, breathing out of the two because I ran into a big crisis triggering situation, and I think, especially too, the weight of those diagnoses just made me feel even worse, right? I’m broken. I have these illnesses, there’s a lot wrong with me, and now I’m experiencing this really traumatic event. So I swallowed my entire bottle of Wellbutrin and woke up from a medically induced coma three or four days later. So I had to go through the psychiatric model, I was an inpatient, where they just tamper with your drugs without even communicating to you about it, just to stabilize your crazy brain chemicals. So I experienced firsthand how dysfunctional the conventional psychiatric model really is, and then I went back to my career in holistic health and fitness. I just kind of kept pulling that thread. I didn’t want to be on the medications forever, I wanted to be able to help myself, my loved ones and others. So it just became this organic evolution as I went from fitness and nutrition to Holistic Health and then functional medicine. And in my functional medicine career, I was like, alright, I really kind of need to niche down here for the sake of business and branding. Who am I trying to serve, right? If you try to serve anybody and everybody, you don’t help anyone. So I really decided mental health is what I’m most passionate about. And now I just love the work that I’m doing at the root cause level.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s awesome. And I so appreciate you being such an open book with sharing your experience, because unfortunately, one of the big battles we still have going on in the realm of mental health is so much stigma and people feeling like they need to keep these things a secret, it’s not okay to talk about them. And that actually is so much more harmful for people. And, especially, I love that you are a man sharing about your experiences at those pivotal ages, because my experience clinically is a lot of young men experience these things at those significant developmental points, and they feel like they are not supposed to talk about it, or their families even don’t talk about it, sort of “No, don’t talk about that.” And that just puts a whole lot of guilt and shame and everything else on top of the struggles. And so I think you’re just providing such a powerful role model for young people, for young men in particular, and for the parents out there who are raising them around being open about your story and not feeling like you need to hide that or be ashamed of it and saying, “This is something that happens. And let’s talk about it.”

Brendan Vermiere

I really appreciate that. And I think you’re so right, it made me think of when I was going through that crisis. My parents didn’t know how to handle it. They didn’t handle it well. I really can’t say that they supported me the way that I needed when I was going through it and kind of the aftermath of it. And here we are, eight years later, never do they mention it. It’s like it never happened, because they still are so uncomfortable with knowing how to even speak about it. They almost lost their son. And they still to this day just don’t know. And they see what I do professionally, and they are proud of me. But I think a lot of parents are not emotionally equipped, let alone be equipped with the knowledge of what’s going on with mental health. And especially, there’s this weird thing going on in society these days with Simone Biles pulling out of the Olympics for her mental health, which became this huge media craze. But I think there’s a little bit of the pendulum swinging the other way, where we are going from, “You shouldn’t talk about it at all”, and there’s this stigma and taboo, but then now I think it’s almost getting distorted the other way where it’s like, “Well, thank you for your vulnerability.” So now you have people speaking out and they are seeking affirmation, and they want people to be like, “Oh, you’re so vulnerable, you’re so brave.” And too much of that isn’t really helpful, either. Let’s actually talk about what’s going on here scientifically, and start educating, because it’s not like it’s just me or the audience. It’s the majority of people that are struggling with their mental health. So what are we doing collectively? Why is this going so wrong?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I think that’s such a good point, because so often, the newer conversation around “Let’s break the stigma.” It’s just like “Well, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about all the problems we are having.” And, okay, that’s good to be more open. Let’s not keep this a secret. Let’s not pretend it’s not happening, at the same time, to your point, let’s also start talking about what’s actually going on and the solutions, because otherwise as a society — and I think this is especially a Gen Z and maybe a bit of a millennial thing right now, everybody is just bathing in this pool of all of our problems and our symptoms and our diagnoses. And while it’s good to be open about that, if we don’t shift into the “Okay, let’s understand what’s happening so we can do something about it.” Yeah, that just becomes even more depressing and anxiety provoking.

Brendan Vermiere

Absolutely, it’s great to be open. And there’s a difference between authentic, genuine vulnerability versus affirmation-seeking behavior and the self-indulgent narratives that I think people find to be relatively addictive and whatnot, but yeah, we actually have to look at what’s going on here. And it’s crazy when you actually look at what Big Pharma is doing for mental health and what’s coming down the Big Pharma pipeline. There’s a lot that we can extrapolate from what’s going on there when we start kind of holistically looking at the standard American lifestyle and environment and sociology, and it’s like, well, no wonder everybody’s struggling a little bit.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Well, let’s talk about that piece about so many people struggling, because I think that it’s really interesting to look at the landscape of mental health right now, particularly as we are wrapping up year two of this pandemic situation. My opinion, based on what I’m seeing clinically and just hearing from people in my personal life and my professional life, is that we are seeing a lot more people struggling with what we could call mental health symptomology, whether we are talking about young kids or teenagers, or we are talking about adults. We seem to be experiencing collectively a whole lot more, everywhere from mild to quite severe symptoms in the range of our mental health. I’m curious what you’re seeing with that and your perspective on that?

Brendan Vermiere

Oh, for sure. I mean, we can look at some of the data from the CDC to get a little bit of insight there, where in the first month of the pandemic, February to March of 2020, we saw psychiatric drug prescription pills go up like 34%, in one month. And the CDC actually just recently released the data from 2020 of all-cause mortality. And so in 2020, the top two killers of Americans were heart disease, number one, cancer number two, COVID was number three, which I don’t think we need to dwell on that. But I think that’s notable, considering that stole the show, and it was number three. And heart disease actually went up by a statistically significant margin from previous years, but it’s still dominant at number one, whereas the 10th leading cause of death for years now, including 2020 is suicide, and the reason it’s not higher is because we have an aging population. But if you look at suicide for ages, I think it’s 10 to 34, it’s the second leading cause of death. And Alzheimer’s, which is neurodegeneration, is number six. Diabetes is seven. And so you start looking at — and I have some beautiful graphs that illustrate this, of obesity rates, diabetes rates, suicide rates, mental health rates, they all go up concomitantly. So maybe there’s some sort of correlation between mental health and metabolic health and metabolic illness. But of course, our conventional system, it’s like, “Well, no, your heart disease has nothing to do with your IBS. That has nothing to do with your anxiety.” We segment the body’s systems, whereas when we look at it holistically and from a root cause kind of ideological perspective, yeah, metabolic illness is kind of the primary underlying cause of a lot of these mental health disorders, whereas as you can appreciate, as a clinical psychologist, maybe 100 years ago, mental illness was a little bit more severe and pronounced. Most people were metabolically healthy and fit, slender, thin, healthy BMI, body weight, so on and so forth. So then the mental illness was more of the schizophrenia or autism or extreme bipolar. It was a more extreme sort of epigenetic presentation that really stood out a lot in our society, whereas these days, well, that has been exacerbated and potentiated and blown up for the depression, anxiety, insomnia, and brain fog. That’s everybody because of a lot of this kind of chronic inflammation, metabolic illness milieu.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s so true. And I think you just communicated really well how those things are going up in tandem with one another. And I think that the conversation around that tends to be for an adult population, but I want to really spotlight for all of us that this is very relevant to the population of children and teens, because we are seeing metabolic syndromes, metabolic disorders in children, even young kids now, that we never used to see. The rates of obesity are dramatically higher than they were when I was a kid. We see children now regularly with fatty livers. We never used to see kids be diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, right? We are seeing children now at increasingly high rates being diagnosed with type II diabetes. Even 15, 20 years ago, if a child was diagnosed with diabetes, it was type I diabetes, right? And now we are seeing this lifestyle. So we are seeing this more and more. And at the same time, to your point, we are seeing exponential increases in neurodevelopmental and mental health issues in kids. And we cannot separate these two things. And yet, you’re so right that in the dominant paradigm, there’s medical, there’s mental health, and they are separate things. So I would love for you to take us through some of those connections, because you focus a lot on metabolic health as an important part of mental health, those pieces together, and I think there’s a lot of people listening who are like, “Well, okay, so I get that the brain and body are connected, but how do things like obesity, or blood sugar or those types of things, how do those connect to the problems that kids and adults are having, with their mood, with their attention with their behavior? Help us kind of connect those dots.

Brendan Vermiere

Absolutely. I always find it helpful to zoom out before zooming in, because zooming in, it’s like you stick your head in the sand, it gets really myopic and reductionistic, where we zoom out and add more of kind of a little bit of an esoteric level, we have to look at that we are the only living species in existence that doesn’t live symbiotically with the natural world. We think we are the higher evolved species, but we don’t live in harmony with nature, which should be a huge red flag at a collective level of, “Hmm, maybe that might bite us in the butt someday.” And it is, within the past 50 years, especially. But really, what I’m getting that there, looking at environmental health, we have an increasingly toxic environment, which there’s an obscene amount of research behind environmental toxins and mental health disorders, of things like the glyphosate, and the xenobiotics, and the plastics and all the environmental toxins that we are exposed to daily. I think everybody in the world has heard about that study where it’s like over 200 chemicals identified in the human placenta of newborns. So there’s the environmental toxicity aspect, there’s the social isolation and not living with nature, we are all just spending our time inside on the computers blue light blasting. So just kind of the simple message of not living a more natural harmonious with one another in the environment lifestyle, but even from more of a lifestyle perspective of sedentary lifestyle, processed food, disrupting our sleep, very stressful and kind of sympathetic nervous system, stimulating lifestyle, very dopamine high, we are always looking for that next high, whether it’s the slushy at the movie theater, or how many likes did we get on social media. So there is that kind of behavioral component to it, but as far as with metabolic illness, we know that obesity and high body fat, we know that that causes more inflammation in the body. We know that inflammation can drive a lot of brain dysfunction and neurochemical brain imbalances. So we know that that excess body fat that even these kiddos are packing on — obesity rates in kids, diabetes, the non-alcoholic fatty liver, we have plenty of research in seeing exactly how the high blood sugar and all the molecules associated with that, or the fatty liver with the ceramides and fatty acids and junk that the liver is spitting out, that actually causes a stunting of the brain’s development and can drive actually neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. Now, they are starting to call Alzheimer’s the type III diabetes, right? So the body fat, the blood sugar, just from a basic fundamental metabolic health perspective, which is horribly relevant to all the kids these days, from my perspective, we can’t be kind of talking about mental illness and treating mental illness in that vacuum reductionist paradigm. We have to think “Hey, this child is metabolically compromised. Let’s get them eating real food and moving and out and sunshine and being social.” They need that stimuli, for not just their psychological well-being, but literally their neurological — the cells of the brain itself.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, it’s so true that the milieu that we raise kids in today is so dramatically different than previous generations. I think you connected those dots really well, and it’s so unfortunate that our healthcare system is so in the dark ages, as far as operating as if these connections exist. We have known for decades now that the brain and body are connected, that metabolic health and mental health are connected, that how our brain functions has everything to do with how our bodies are functioning, and yet our systems of care still operate as if that’s not true. And so we send kids who are having behavioral issues or mental health symptoms or developmental problems — they very quickly get shuttled into the system of mental health care of the schools for education, and nobody is looking at and connecting those dots for them, and then we wonder why they continue to struggle and why parents feel frustrated, because we are leaving out that whole piece for most of these kids around why they have developed these problems in the first place.

Brendan Vermiere

Absolutely I think back to my childhood. I was outside and active all the time. I think I ate alright for a kid from my generation and whatnot, but I’ve been watching Cobra Kai on Netflix, and there’s the son in the show who is the prototypical, he’s an overweight kid who’s addicted to his processed food, his sugar and staring at his iPad, and dad is trying to get him to do karate, which is fun for me because I did karate growing up and whatnot. So I’m looking at this prototypical kid like, that’s the standard American kid that is going to have the depression, anxiety, ADHD. And I don’t know what’s going on in school systems anymore, but what happened to recess? What happened to moving in the sunshine? It’s crazy to me how for decades now, we have always recommended to geriatric patients with progressed neurodegeneration to do physical therapy, to do puzzles because it slows down the neurodegeneration. But we don’t apply that same logic to the kids. We are just like, “Nah, just put them on Ritalin. They’ll be fine”, right?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Right. And we put kids on all these things so that they will better fit in the artificial boxes of childhood that we have created. And then we go “Oh, what could possibly go wrong?” We create a developmentally inappropriate weird box that they need to exist in in school and society, whatever. They don’t do well with that, so then we medicate them to fit in the box, and then we wonder why everybody’s dysfunction.

Brendan Vermiere

Yeah. Well, now we are trying to normalize the dysfunction. We are trying to normalize the increase in neurodevelopmental disorders. 1 in 44 kids these days are born with autism. I just saw a show on Amazon Prime that’s about autistic teenagers trying to live life and whatnot. So we are trying to normalize it just as we are trying to normalize obesity and being overweight. I’ve seen billboards in various cities that obesity — and this is healthy, and it’s like, okay, there’s a difference between shaming somebody versus enabling self-destructive ideology and behavior. And that’s a slippery slope, as soon as we start normalizing something that we know medically, is unhealthy and is an economic burden.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That’s right, and my thinking is sort of what you’re alluding to there in the realm of neurodevelopmental stuff, is the whole movement towards a difference in processing, being neurodivergent, all of that, which I think from the standpoint of accepting people for who they are is awesome, and for taking the stigma away and the shame away from maybe having processing differences and having a different type of brain. I think that that’s amazing. And where I think it crosses the threshold into being problematic is exactly what you’re saying, of normalizing very significant symptomology that actually is not part of that neurodivergent profile. We can talk about thinking differences and personality differences and ways of being all day long, and that’s great, but a lot of these children and now adults are struggling with very severe issues of sensory processing, anxiety, unstable mood, sleep dysregulation, all of these things that are being normalized as part of being neurodivergent, but actually, those are real physiologically-based issues that we can help people with. I’m not interested in making a child be someone they are not, in taking away something that is unique to them or making them fit into a certain mold. I am very committed to making sure they are sleeping well, that if they are living with paralyzing anxiety, that’s preventing them from functioning, that we are doing something to reduce that, that we are helping them feel comfortable in their own skin. These are important things. And I think that nuance is getting lost in that discussion, as you said.

Brendan Vermiere

I think you’re so right. It is the nuance that people aren’t talking about. It’s like pick a side, pick a camp and jump in. It’s actually a very nuanced conversation, because what we are talking about is regardless of what spectrum somebody might fall on, we are trying to improve their functionality so that they can express themselves, their unique characteristics, their unique neurodevelopmental gifts to the highest degree. You could have two twin boys that are both diagnosed as autism spectrum. One could be much higher functioning than the other depending on the epigenetics, the lifestyle, the environment. If those two sons lived in separate homes with separate parents, one’s eating processed food and sedentary and whatever, the other is active, eating real food, who do you think is going to be able to express their uniqueness at a healthier degree versus a more dysfunctional degree?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s a beautiful example. I think that’s so true. Let’s delve into some of these specific connections because I think it’s important to touch on the connection here between the gut and the brain, because this is another piece, again, that we have had good research on now for a while that is largely being ignored in mainstream mental health treatment. So talk to us a bit about why you — Well, first of all, what the gut-brain access is and why you feel this is important for us to be looking at, from the standpoint of understanding sort of evaluating what’s going on, as well as treating and supporting somebody.

Brendan Vermiere

Oh, absolutely. The gut-brain access is so huge. And when I think of root causes of mental health dysfunction, I’m immediately thinking just good old metabolic health as we have been depicting, and then gut health and the gut, liver, brain axis, there’s all these axes. But it brings to the conversation the subject of the microbiome, which we just can’t emphasize enough. Obviously, our understanding of the microbiome is very much in its infancy, overall, but we know enough to realize there’s no disease or condition that isn’t directly related to the microbiome. And we are in this sort of extinction event, right? So I always like to think about the microbiome as the Garden of Life, it’s all these different types of microbes, parasites, virus, fungi, bacteria, archaea, so on and so forth, that they live in us and on us, and they are all around us in the environment. Then this is where just by living not very close to nature anymore — we evolved in nature. We used to live in the dirt and live in caves and drink from the creeks and the streams, whereas now, we are in this germ theory, sterilize everything, right? And especially the past two years. I’ve never seen so much fear of germs. And so we are quite literally killing off the building blocks of life itself that are these microbes. So with the gut-brain axis, it’s like we have got the second brain in the gut, the enteric nervous system down there. And it is all those microbes that give us our functionality. That’s where we got our neurotransmitters, that’s where we get a lot of the molecules that actually help our brain develop. So when we are talking about neurodevelopmental disorders from birth to age 10 and everything, those microbes, and that gut health, and that Garden of Life give us so many signals that will either cause kind of a stuntedness of how the brain is developing and wiring within itself, or really healing and regenerating and promoting. So this is where we kind of have to learn how we grow a healthy garden in our gut, and all the antibiotics and processed food, and there’s conversations we had around vaccines, obviously, as well, and all that everything, but everything we are doing is kind of disrupting that gut brain axis that drives a lot of the symptomology that many of us are experiencing.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, and even sort of our culture of high stress creates a problem there. And it’s not just for adults. The American Psychological Association releases their annual report on Stress in America, and they look at adults and kids. When we look at it for children and teens, what we have seen is those numbers steadily increasing, in terms of the number of kids who are experiencing high levels of stress, and I found it really interesting. This was I think — I don’t remember if it was the report that they released in 2019 or 2020, but what the takeaway was is that our teenagers, our high school aged teens in America experience a level of stress now that middle aged adults were reporting 20 years ago. And you think about that: Our children, our high school aged kids are experiencing the same level of stress now that middle aged adults have historically experienced, and of course, without the brain maturity, the coping skills, the intellect, the experience to be able to regulate that, it’s become really toxic. And stress has a huge impact on the microbiome, doesn’t it?

Brendan Vermiere

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we see through literature how stress can increase the risk of neurodegeneration long term, and it suppresses immunity and digestive function, So we can’t even effectively digest and absorb our nutrients, we can’t ward off any bad bugs, naughty microbes that start over growing down there. So it’s just such a huge problem. The stress of our modern society could maybe be public enemy number one, I would say.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it. And I’d love for you to draw the connection to trauma here because trauma, psychological trauma is becoming a big topic. There’s several people that you and I know who have been really on the forefront of bringing this to more common public knowledge, around the connections between trauma, particularly early trauma and mental health. And I think, especially when we are talking about kids, a lot of our listeners may have children who have come into their lives through the foster care system or adoption, where trauma has become more recognized as a factor. But I think we are recognizing that so many children, especially if they have symptoms of various things, have experienced different levels of trauma in different ways. And so to sort of segue from the discussion of stress more generically into trauma, I’d love for you to talk a little bit about the connection between trauma and the gut microbiome, the physiological stuff and the mental health pieces.

Brendan Vermiere

Yeah, I’m glad that we are going there because there is a lot of really interesting research coming out about it. And kind of what we said at the beginning of the show. I mean, I’m glad that there’s a lot more awareness and acceptance around trauma, right? We can’t change anything without some degree of awareness. But again, I think there’s almost an over-fixation on identifying as being traumatized like “Me, too. I’m also traumatized”, which I mean, first off, I think we have to recognize trauma just like autism or ADHD or anything else, it’s a spectrum, right? It could be talking about more severe PTSD like veterans, which is obviously demographic, I have a lot of compassion for, versus other types of maybe more mild — and where do you draw the line of trauma versus kind of harsh conditioning and tough parenting? I think it’s a little bit subjective. I think what’s really interesting more from a hard science perspective on trauma, is we are really starting to see that adverse childhood events, early life stress, and childhood trauma, it really does change the neurophysiology and neurochemistry of what’s going on in the brain. So all my research around microglial cells, which are the immune cells of the brain, they help protect the brain from foreign invaders, and they help sculpt the brain, they have a huge impact on how the brain wires itself and how it develops early in life. And what we see through the literature through all sorts of cool observational studies and also animal research, is we see how some sort of stressful than or traumatic event actually skews these microglial immune cells to more of a pro-inflammatory phenotype, which really sets the stage for kind of brain on fire, if you will, that drives a lot of depression and anxiety. And so this is actually really cool. I say it all the time. And I guess I’ll just say it for another decade or two, and maybe it’ll catch on. But they are actually doing some really cool research, especially with rodents, where they will take rats and they will traumatize them to induce this neuroinflammatory brain on fire. And so now, the rats behave like they are traumatized. They exhibit anxiety-like behavior, depressive-like behavior, they are traumatized. And they measure those microglial cells and see, yeah, they are very inflamed in the brain. And they are doing experimental research where they will give some sort of therapeutics such as minocycline, which is an antibiotic that crosses the blood brain barrier and quiets down those neuroinflammatory cells, and then the PTSD behavior goes away. So they are actually looking at different types of therapeutic compounds. We actually might be able to clinically treat PTSD. It might not really be the psycho-emotional, “Oh, you just have to do decades of therapy with marginal improvement.” But maybe if we actually fix the cellular dysfunction that occurs in PTSD, it can really reduce the symptomology. So I think it’s a really exciting area of research.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Absolutely. And I love that you delved into that a bit, because I think there are more options coming out around that, that people are aware of, including things like psychedelics, cannabis, ketamine, these kinds of things that I know a lot of parents, if they start to go down the rabbit hole of looking into this stuff, they are exposed to that. And I know you and I share a similar viewpoint on that though, that while those things can be helpful therapeutics, there still is heavily a masking component to a lot of those things, the potential for addiction, the sort of escape mechanism that can be at play with some of those things, compared to some of the stuff you’re talking about, where really getting in there and changing the physiological structure, changing the way that the brain is wiring itself, processing itself, changing the microbiome, all of these things that actually can resolve symptoms, that we don’t just need to be focused on the psychological piece of, well, let’s reduce the anxiety around it, or help you to reframe it, or sort of approach it from a top down. This is really more of a bottom-up kind of approach.

Brendan Vermiere

Yeah, we have to break out of the pill for the ill mindset, because a lot of what I like to do is I’m looking at the mechanistic pharmacological research to see: Alright, so for example, what’s rolling down the Big Pharma pipeline, it’s all about monoclonal antibodies these days, which I think is an amazing medical tool, great that we have them. But what they are doing, I think phase two clinical trials right now is interleukin 6 pro-inflammatory neutralizing drug. So this monoclonal antibody that basically just blocks the inflammatory signal, and they are planning on releasing it to the world as an antidepressant, a second line antidepressant. So, all right, we tried the SSRIs, but that didn’t really work. Let’s try this drug instead that blocks inflammation. But what we see, the problem with those drugs is they are immunosuppressive. So maybe it improves your depressive symptoms, but now you’re more susceptible to infection, which that’s not relevant during an infectious disease pandemic. But we can use that same science to reverse engineer it. Like, well, if that helps, and it’s really kind of an inflammatory problem, let’s reverse engineer that and go from the bottom up. What can we do to improve the health promoting effects of the environment and the lifestyle? To me, it doesn’t make any sense to use some of these cool — they are cool drugs, they’re very cool. But isn’t the greatest medicine of all to teach people how to not need it? So that brings us back to: Well if there’s obesity and fatty liver and gut dysfunction, and they are not active, and they are eating processed food, and in a stressful environment, why don’t we work on that, right? Use the drugs accordingly, talk to your doctor, but let’s try to not need them, right? And we can use the same science to reverse engineer it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And I think that’s a brilliant point. And the idea that medications, pharmaceuticals can and do play a role for some people. And as the research shows, with almost everything therapeutically, pharmaceutically, in mental health, you may get some short-term benefit. But over the long term, we have very, very poor outcomes, even for people who initially do well. And so my way of thinking, and I know, that’s really what you’re getting at here is, if we need to use pharmaceuticals in the shorter term to help people get more at the root and make the bigger picture changes that are going to help them longer term, that’s really where we want to be. And unfortunately, most people are put on medications whether they work or not for them, and they are left on them forever, and nobody’s helping people do the work of longer-term change to shift this inflammation picture, to shift the microbiome. So I’d love to have you comment on two things around this. One is: In the traditional world of mental health, behavioral health, a kid comes in, a teen comes in, an adult comes in with symptoms. It’s like okay, here’s our checklist. Here’s our assessments, oh, here’s your diagnosis, here’s your medication, and here’s your therapist. So from an evaluation standpoint, what do you feel are some important things, even on a more physiological level, that if you could wave a magic wand and change the realm of mental health and medicine when a kid or an adult comes in with mental health kinds of symptoms or developmental kinds of symptoms, beyond the checklist and the observations, are there some tests — are there are some things metabolically, lab-wise, that you would like to see become sort of an initial standard of care in terms of how we are assessing these people?

Brendan Vermiere

Absolutely, that’s been one of my huge kind of professional goals with this in developing my own panel, The Mental Map, because I was really bothered that I went through what I went through, and the only time any blood work was done was when I was in the intensive care unit. I think regardless of what the healing journey is, we have to be objective about it. And I’m not saying that psychiatric subjective qualification is useless. But we have to be scientific, we have to be objective with it, because if you run some basic blood work on a kid and their vitamin D is at 10 or 20 and their glucose is at 120, and their liver enzymes are elevated, they are metabolically compromised. And if we can improve the blood sugar regulation, improve the digestive function, if we can reduce inflammatory markers — there’s so many different inflammatory and nutritional markers that have all been studied in regards to mental health, like mineral levels, magnesium, and zinc, and copper, and sodium, potassium, and iron, right? So we have to be assessing these things, because there are so many nutritional insufficiencies that a lot of these kids have, because it’s paradoxical how the American population is overfed, yet malnourished, right? So when you look at that in somebody’s blood profile, and other tests can be helpful, too, but you see that the sugar and the lipids are all messed up, yet the nutrients themselves, the vitamins, the minerals are all pretty low, and you see the inflammatory and oxidative stress markers creeping up and up. So you see, as those blood markers normalize, their behavior gets better, they feel better, the symptoms go down in a way. So I’d like to really bring that objectivity to it. So that way, regardless of what intervention strategies you want to use in your healing journey, great, go do whatever you want. If that’s psychedelics, great, if that’s ketamine, psychiatric drugs, or some diet program, go do whatever resonates with you, but at least be objective in seeing: Is that actually improving my physiology using these really sensitive biomarkers? So there’s so much that can be explored with that. And then all the wild too — there’s some of the more exotic things like dysbiosis or mold, or some of these other kinds of root cause subjects that are just not well known.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Well, and I think to that point, you talk a lot about mold and toxic environments, and even stealth infections. There’s now more and more talk about things like Lyme and Epstein-Barr, and these things that can really become problematic as kids get older and can create a lot of symptoms. And what I find interesting is that because in the field of mental health and medicine, we really don’t delve into even the basics. Forget about delving into the more complex things. Sometimes I’ll have a parent come to me, and they are like “My kid’s having all these issues, and I’ve read about Lyme, and I’ve read about all these, and I want all the tests done.” And I say, “Well, let’s start with some basics first, because often we can uncover some things there”. And then it’s sort of a layered approach of, okay, if we have got the basics down, if we have repleted nutrient levels, if we are getting inflammation down, if we are dealing with these things, and somebody’s still really struggling, now we move to the next level of, okay, what do we have going on here? And it’s sort of peeling back these layers of the onion. But unfortunately, the vast majority of children and adults are not even getting a basic level of care around that, let alone having it identified that, “Wow, maybe your kid has been in inpatient psychiatric unit three times in the last 12 months because they have a high level of lead from where you live, in the water supply, or because there’s mold toxicity in the home that you just moved into, or they got a tick bite. No one is thinking about these things.

Brendan Vermiere

Yeah, it really is unfortunate. And that’s why on the mental map, I included a lot of immunological markers that are assessing for inflammation and immune activation is sky high, or there’s just so many of these factors that it can be hard, too, because if you go down these individual root cause rabbit holes, you can kind of get lost and maybe even led astray. Like you’re pursuing a root cause that might not at all be relevant. So you do have to kind of bring it back to evaluating the physiology, which I think is such an important take home message for everybody is: What is your physiology doing? And at the end of the day, bloodwork is by far the best way to assess physiology, but this is also where the difference of having your conventional medical doctor looking at the blood chemistry from the perspective of acute illness or severe medical instability, versus more functionality, right? You can’t say that somebody with a blood sugar of 130 is the same as somebody with a blood sugar of 95. All the while, well, where should their blood sugar be? So we kind of have to evaluate what’s going on nutritionally and with the immune system and inflammatory levels, and then be thinking, “Well, what root cause factors from the environment or lifestyle are contributing to this physiological dysfunction?” Like, “Yeah, there’s lead pain in the kids room”, or “The WiFi router is right underneath their bed”, or “Oh, maybe that black mold might have something to do with it, or the tick that I picked out of their back a year ago”, because those are all very, very relevant for disrupting neurophysiology.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And I appreciate you spotlighting all those things just to get the wheels turning for our listeners, who maybe have delved into a bunch of things, or maybe just felt like their kid is getting worse and they done all the behavioral things, are doing all the things they are being told, and just to get people’s wheels turning as to the number of things that may be going on. And that can simultaneously feel empowering and overwhelming, right? So I would say just take it one piece at a time, but just expanding people’s awareness around the number of factors here because so often the message in mental health is, “Well, this is just how you are, it’s how it’s going to be, this is how your kid is. Better get some sticker charts out and give them their pills and learn to deal with it.” And you and I know that that is so far from the truth, even for the most severely impaired kiddos. So in a moment I’m going to be sure people can find out more about your Mental Map and those things, but I’d love to wrap up by panning out — again, you did a beautiful job when you started, you said “Let’s take the big picture view”, and then we kind of got into the nitty gritty. I want to pan back to the big picture and have you leave people with one or two things that you feel like every parent listening, every professional listening can be thinking about, can be doing to support kids’ mental health. Maybe it’s something physiological, maybe something lifestyle, maybe something spiritual for all of our parents and our practitioners listening. What are one or two things that you think in the big picture are really important for us to be thinking about for our kids?

Brendan Vermiere

Absolutely I think there’s more pressure on kids than ever today. Kids are growing up way too fast. We are exposing them to the horrors of adulthood way too early. And part of it’s just their accessibility to the internet and everything that’s on there. We see this shift in society, even with the movies. Movies today are not how movies were when I was a kid. They were more rhetorical and feel-good as a kid, now they are gruesome. The ideas that they are programming. I think it’s awful. But the three big buckets I think of are decreasing the kids’ stress load. Take some pressure off the kid, let kids be kids, let them be creative and wild and free, not trying to “Well, we have to make you fit into this bucket, this box, and we are going to medicate you until you’re compliant.” That’s not the right way. That doesn’t allow them to express themselves to the full degree of their authentic nature. So decreasing that stress load, looking at is the environment they are in, like “Hey, is the environment going be conducive to them growing to their fullest potential?”, but also, again, with my background in fitness and nutrition, it amazes me how there are 99 problems, but being active and fit and eating real food fixes 98 of them. So I think if we can bring down the stress load, get the sleep hygiene up, feed them real, whole, nutritious food from the earth, get them moving outside in sunlight, get them social, that by itself can ameliorate the vast majority of the issues. And if that’s been practiced consistently, and they are still struggling, that’s when exploring some of these root cause factors really becomes helpful.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love it. I love it. I want you to share with people where they can find out more about you, about the work that you’re doing, about your Mental Map lab panel. Give us all the details.

Brendan Vermiere

Absolutely. Thanks so much. My website is metabolicsolutionsllc.com, and you can find everything related to me and my business on there. My Instagram is @the_holistic_savage and that’s where I just pump out lots of good content. That’s the main platform. But The Mental Map has been such a passion project, and I’m just ramping up my work with my not-for-profit research foundation where we are going to be doing a lot of cool science around that. But The Mental Map is really a great test that we are trying to get into the hands of as many practitioners and self-healers, patients, clients, consumers as possible. And we are actually excited to announce that we are about to release an at home version of that test, because we have the venous blood draw, which that’s the most thorough, the most accurate, the most comprehensive, but not everybody can do a big venous blood draw, especially if you have a young child and they are underweight or whatever, so we are developing an at-home version that’s a finger prick and a urine assessment, that still gives us really good data. So I’m excited about it. I think data is very empowering so that way we are objective on what’s working?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love that you’re bringing more objectivity to this. It’s awesome. The work that you’re doing is so amazing. And thank you for everything that you’re doing in general, around this topic, and to serve people and developing the tools and the resources that you are, and also thank you for spending some time with us today. This has been an awesome conversation.

Brendan Vermiere

Absolutely been my pleasure. I really appreciate you and the work you’re doing as well. I think we are a dream team here.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Absolutely. And thank you, as always, to all of you for being here and for listening. We will catch you back here next time.