Between January 2023 and December 2024, inpatient mental health claims increased by 80% in the US, while outpatient claims increased by 40%. This indexes a mental health crisis in our country of unprecedented scope. Here’s the context: Our national health status is worse than that of our peer countries, and it is declining in all age brackets. Our life expectancy is ranked lowest, as is our infant mortality rate (by a factor of two with respect to the average of our peers). This trend has been long underway. Back in 1991, the book titled “Betrayal of Health” was published that identified the usual culprits in our looming healthcare crisis: Personal behavior, nutrition-less food, toxics in the environment and in our agriculture, etc. A ‘biobehavioral’ remedy was urgently called for.
Over the succeeding third of a century, matters have only gotten worse in all these areas. The dominant causal factors in chronic medical disease remain lifestyle-related. These, in turn, are rooted in our collective state of dysregulation. Thus, the key to chronic medical disease is our mental health status. The key to mental health status is brain functional competence—core state regulation. The heart of core state regulation, however, lies in the emotional rather than the cognitive domain. Much of our society exists in a state of estrangement from their essential selves.
Our society is no longer organized around our basic needs at the level of the family. It has become malignly indifferent to our collective state of well-being. But even in Denmark, where social welfare is not neglected, the markers of emotional distress in young girls have decremented by four years over the last fifteen years. We and our peer countries are in a civilizational crisis in which our children are the canaries.
The distribution of the healthcare burden is bimodal, and Pareto’s Law applies. In its simplest formulation, it states that 20% of the population accounts for 80% of the impact. Perhaps one-quarter of our children have a history of early childhood trauma. They are at high risk of undergoing a dysregulation cascade that eventuates in chronic medical disease. Thus, early emotional trauma is the principal causal factor accounting for the vast majority of our medical costs due to chronic medical disease over the lifespan. It also accounts for much of our violence and other crime, of school failure, and of social dysfunction.
Early emotional trauma is the toughest challenge we confront in our work. The category includes borderlines, DID, and the personality disorders. It accounts for much of our problem with treatment-resistant addiction, chronic pain, and eating disorders. The most promising path to recovery we have found is Endogenous Neuromodulation and synchrony training in the Infra-Low Frequency regime. With adolescents and adults, this is combined with Alpha-Theta training.
Our optimal functioning approach also serves in the role of prevention. The social and health care calamity we are living with has only one viable and affordable remedy: the move toward a prevention model. With respect to trauma syndromes, the objective is to allow the trainee’s brain to relinquish the defenses of the trauma response and thus to abort the dysregulation cascade. The earlier in life this is undertaken, the better. This approach is subject to the least constraints when engaged early in life, before dysfunctions have elaborated and compounded.
In this arena, there is no known alternative, and the need is great. The only viable neurofeedback option we have for infancy and early childhood is Endogenous Neuromodulation. We can best meet the needs of our society by giving our infants and young children a healthy start. We offer remediation to everyone else. This includes the autistic spectrum, in particular. In our optimal functioning model, one need not wait for a diagnostic threshold to be crossed. It is better to solve problems that are latent rather than manifest.
Our discipline has attracted the broadest category of health professionals, and it has done so for the best of reasons. It is the only discipline that regards ‘regulation’ per se as its objective, as well as the pathway to effect recovery. We must now raise regulatory competence to the level of primacy in our healthcare enterprise. Training core state regulation according to the regulatory hierarchy, the developmental hierarchy, and the frequency hierarchy by way of Endogenous Neuromodulation offers us an efficient remedy, one that is synergistic with nature’s design, for our most significant societal challenges.
