Psychiatric Symptoms, Mold and Environmental Toxicity
Acquired environmental illness may be the future of psychiatry.
Environmentally acquired illnesses (EAI) are often not recognized by conventional medicine. Patients run from one doctor to another and no one can help them. The usual lab studies often reveal nothing treatable because their health care providers are not testing for the right things. When all the studies come back normal, a patient may be told that her somatic concerns are an expression of her anxiety or depression, and that she should see a psychiatrist. If the underlying cause of these symptoms is an environmentally acquired illness, diagnosis is critical to healing.
(Additional background about the most common type of EAI, mold toxicity, can be found in a previous Psychology Today blog post: Mold Toxicity: A Common Cause of Psychiatric Symptoms.)
The International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness (ISEAI) is an exciting new organization whose stated mission is to “restore health to individuals with environmentally acquired illnesses through clinical practice, education, and research.” Environmentally acquired illnesses are those that are a result of environmental triggers such as mold, infection with tick-borne illnesses, chemical exposure from a variety of sources such as plastics, heavy metals, pesticides, personal care products, and electromagnetic frequencies, to name a few. This organization is responding to a desperate need as these sorts of conditions are becoming epidemic and more people are getting sicker and sicker. These illnesses all adversely impact the immune system and set up a chronic inflammatory response. ISEAI will hold its inaugural professional conference in May 2019 in Phoenix, Arizona. It is entitled, “Healing Complex Patients in a Toxic World.”