Mental Illness

My understanding of mental illness symptoms and healing.

Our body is given by God with all the intricate functions like a brand-new car. As we grow up, mental illness starts to hit us. Start with Autism, this is one of the toughest to treat, as so far we could not find the causes yet. The prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the United States is estimated to be 1 in 31 children aged 8 years. In 2025, FDA started to restrict some food dyes, more restriction in developing new vaccines and started to review previous vaccines. In my own opinion, water quality, chemical contamination in food, microplastic in kitchenware, ultra processed food, high sugar intake and micro bacterial in living environments needs to be considered too.

Teenage behavior disturbance therapy needs mostly focus on counseling, but healthy diet habits also need to be addressed to ensure there are enough nutrients for the mitochondria to function properly. Zinc deficiency and Copper over load were seen in lots of ADHD teenagers. A healthy diet with slow correction of Zinc level could avoid the use of addictive stimulants like Adderall and Vyvanse, which can control your life for decades. One disease call Pyrrole disorder could be misdiagnosed with symptoms of depression, Bipolar disorder, ADHD. Specific vitamin supplements could resolve the symptoms in a few months.

Abrupt and chronic use of antipsychotics could harm a healthy child’s brain development, as we know, the human brain does not fully mature until age 25. I am hesitant to put antipsychotics as the first line to treat children’s behavior disturbance symptoms. Conventional antidepressants (SSRI and SNRI) just delay the degradation and recycling of serotonin. If a human’s brain tissue is not good enough (due to malnutrition, inflammation, stress or toxins), it would not help their symptoms at all. I will focus on sleep hygiene, healthy diet, family stressors and trauma exploration.

Trauma could affect gene expression (not mutation) and can be passed down to future generations and increase their vulnerability to conditions like PTSD, anxiety, or depression, even without experiencing the original trauma firsthand.

When we get older, we face a lot of stressors from outside (family, work, school, relationships and trauma) and inside (desires) puts our neurological system under chronic stress. Good sleep, proper exercise, relaxation rituals and healthy diet can help our body to function well and recover quickly from stress. Otherwise, when the mitochondria is overworked, energy production become less efficient, and our body will feel tired and exhausted. In the mental illness field, insomnia, poor energy and GI symptoms are ahead of depression, anxiety and lack of focus symptoms. Conventional treatments just take care of symptoms to relieve anxiety, sleep (with Xanax), focus (Adderall), mask or ignore the causes. In hospital consult service for postpartum depression and medical condition related depression, antidepressant becomes the 1st line treatment, but I think psychotherapy should be the first line of therapy, because antidepressants would not alleviate mitochondria malfunction when the patient already had pathological changes in their body.

In my own opinions, mental illness is related to:

• Anatomical changes (as seen in schizophrenia)
• Biochemical dysfunctions from gene modification to protein expression to networking (DNA methylation, mitochondria dysfunction, membrane ion channel dysfunction, hormone protein imbalance, neuronal network system dysfunction)
• Soul aspects (overlook domain but most fundamental) include sense of meaning, morality, identity, purpose and spiritual connection. This area reflects personality disorder, overthinking habits, sense of insecure, unsatisfaction, depression and anxiety symptoms.