Salus June 4, 2025

Gay

Well, in mental health, it’s been ignored. So maybe I should speak more to that ignorance, at least from my experience. Very few mental health professionals that I know around the world think of the whole biological process as part of what can contribute to mental illness. So, the gut and excrement might not be ignored in the medical realm. Concern for the gut and excrement has been around for centuries. Clearly, there was a time from a medical perspective when the gut had more weightiness or reverence. However, in the psychological realm, to this day, we still treat people like the illness is only happening elsewhere, in the head. That’s why psychiatrists give psychotropic medication. Yet the biology is informing the neurobiology, and vice versa. Am I wrong about that? I mean, it seems to me they are connected.

Bill G

I think that’s certainly true, but if you ever have the misfortune of watching commercials in between the segments of CNN, and if you don’t skip over them, there’s a whole bunch of commercials now promoting healthy bowel movements on a daily basis. Women in the ads grab their stomachs and take this product. They then go out with their friends to have a nice jog in the park because they’ve taken an effective product that restores the balance of their bowels. I don’t know if you’ve caught these commercials, but there’s been an exponential path of growth among the commercial promoters. Somehow, they’ve accepted that having a healthy, regular, satisfying bowel movement is one of the keys to happiness.

Bill B

I want to go back to the actual basic metaphor that Gay brought up, and for a moment, I want to bring back my experience.  I used to work in a mental hospital, and one of the ones that One Flew Over The  Cuckoo’s Nest was based on. The finances of that VA hospital were such that they needed to get people out of the hospital. They needed to have a high percentage of successful treatments. So, they were pumping these men out of the hospital and sending them off to work sites. It was Oregon, so many of the existing patients went to work for very low pay at lumber processing plants, cutting the incoming tree trunks into construction-grade lumber. When the patient population got too low at the hospital, the staff were instructed, in essence, not to heal people. We need to retain our patients here in the VA. We need to keep them around for a while because we need the beds to be filled. It’s interesting that that whole issue of what was to be “pooped” out of the VA hospital was based on fee for service– much like what Jeremy, Jack, and all of you have been saying. There was that whole interesting piece in mental hospitals about how to declare someone “mentally healthy”. This declaration was based more on the economics of the system than on anything concerning the person’s gut or brain.