Hi everybody!  Super excited to announce that I have been invited to be a blogger for The Brooklyn Reader.   After much ado, brainstorming, picking the brains of my family, friends and Facebook friends, I settled on a title for the blog.  And the title is.... (drum roll...)  BRANIAC M.D.!

If you have a brain, this blog is for you.

This blog is for you because – if you have a brain – that means you think about things. You feel things.  You do things.  If you have a brain – at some point in your life, your thoughts have held you back.  Your feelings have weighed you down, and some of the things you’ve done have caused you problems.  I know this to be true because you are human…and you have a brain.

Although mental symptoms are so vilified in the American culture, the truth is that all of us either have had, currently have and/or will have mental symptoms during our lives.  Depression, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, trouble sleeping, misuse of alcohol and other drugs, thoughts of suicide, rage and violence, and so on, are extremely common.  So while STIGMA makes you believe you are the only one who has had these symptoms, the truth is that if you’ve never had mental symptoms a day in your life – you are the exception.  I’ll take it a step further.  If you’ve never had mental symptoms a day in your life, either your brain does not work or frankly you are just not human.

Ask yourself this question.   When you get short of breath, do you consider yourself weak?  No?!  Well why not?  Shortness of breath is your lungs yelling for help.  Another question – when you get back pain, do you think to yourself ‘If I was a better person, this wouldn’t happen to me’?  No again?!  But your back is not doing its job!  OK, one more:  when you feel depressed and the thought that you can’t continue to live like this enters your mind, do you feel pressure to hide it?   For so many, the answer to the last question is yes.   We are a society of brainists.  Yep, I pulled the brain card.  We allow every other organ in our bodies to cry out when in need, coughing, wheezing, aching, vomiting, hurting, and yet when our brain does so, suddenly STIGMA makes it unacceptable to mention.

The goal of this blog is to remove the cloak that prevents us from talking about our mental symptoms.   I will provide you with education on the biology of how the brain does it what it does (i.e. thinking, feeling, behaving), answer your questions about what the heck is going on and as importantly, what the heck can you do about it.  We will pull the rug out from under the stigma that makes people suffer in silence and allows mental symptoms to sap the functionality from people’s lives.

I welcome you and hope you will join me in the movement to END BRAINISM, one blog at a time.

Submit your questions by using the Ask the Doctor form at my website and pop on over to the Local Voices section of The Brooklyn Reader to see what we are talking about at Braniac, M.D.