MENTAL HEALTH, CURRENT DIAGNOSTIC & TREATMENT PARADIGMS

Mental Health in the UK

One in four people in the UK experience a mental health problem currently

The NHS and pharmaceutical advances have provided extraordinary benefits for the people of the UK, delivering free access to treatment that has saved and extended countless lives. However, the dominant medical model has long centred on a biochemical view of illness. Diagnosis is categorised, medication prescribed & symptoms treated in isolation.

This NHS approach has strengths, but it also has blind spots.

Many patients find that their symptoms persist, resurface or multiply over time. Professionals themselves are often limited by training syllabi that have not kept pace with modern neuroscience, leaving crucial knowledge about the interplay of brain, body & environment absent from mainstream care. In reality, health is not confined to neat categories in a textbook. Emotional, social & physiological factors are inseparable & unless we address them together, wellness remains inaccessible and incomplete.

city zebra crossing from above. Many people walking in different directions and each labelled with a different illness: chronic pain seizures vertigo trauma grief addictions depression restless leg syndrome OCD hypervigilant

WHAT DEFINES:
Wellness, Health & Current Treatments

It is only in medical textbooks that the body’s complex systems are neatly separated.

Over the past decade, I have observed a sharp increase in mental health difficulties across the UK. Recent research reveals that common mental health problems affect approximately one in six adults in England every week, and up to one in four experience a mental health issue across a year. These are far from minor trends, they translate into a staggering economic burden.

In 2022, the total societal cost of mental ill health in England reached approximately £300 billion, encompassing economic losses, diminished quality of life, healthcare and care costs. This underscores the urgency of reframing how we understand and respond to emotional distress.

For most of us in England, wellness is something we expect simply by living our daily lives: moving, eating, sleeping & managing the basics that keep us functioning. When we fall ill, we instinctively turn to the familiar systems of support: the medication drawer at home, the pharmacist or the NHS for answers, diagnoses & treatment. From a simple Lemsip to antibiotics, from surgery to therapy, this medical model has long shaped how we think about health.

Emotional Health Versus Mental Health & What I Taught

In my healthcare career, about twenty years ago, I served as a national healthcare trainer for large care providers. At that time, mental health training focused almost exclusively on conditions like schizophrenia, agoraphobia, and other severe psychiatric disorders. No one was discussing the grief of losing a pet or the overwhelm of everyday stress. Today, far too often, ordinary human emotions are treated as medical issues, which distorts how people experience and seek support.

The Medicalisation of Emotional Health

Our current systems tend to medicalise emotional health, offering solutions that are expedient but often superficial. Such an approach may facilitate a return to work, but it frequently bypasses deeper underlying causes. Talk therapy is powerful and valuable, but when it comes to trauma such as PTSD or complex PTSD, the spoken word alone often cannot reach the amygdala, the fear-driven region of the brain.

The NHS and pharmaceutical industry have undoubtedly given us extraordinary benefits, providing almost universal access to free treatment and prescriptions. Yet the solutions offered have often been insufficient, as the system has focused on a single route to healing: the biochemical model. This has left many people without lasting answers, avoiding surgery or repeated medications because the root causes of their suffering remain unaddressed.

Medical knowledge has advanced at a remarkable pace over the last few decades, but professional training has not always kept up. Doctors and nurses are trained with outdated university syllabi, lagging behind the evolving advances in trauma, psychedelic or sleep medic sciences to name a few, leaving patients to search for solutions outside the conventional system. Increasingly, lesser-known approaches that honour the body as an interconnected network, where mind, nervous system & physiology function in unison, are beginning to emerge.

Our lived reality shows us: emotional, social & environmental factors combined contribute powerfully to health, wellness & recovery.

As a healthcare professional for two decades I have seen the reliance on quick fixes, repeat patients returning to ill health with new manifestations of the same issues and worse of all, I have been through that NHS journey as a service user facing misdiagnosis, no diagnosis, being treated for the wrong things and for my own sanity having to leave the UK to recover at times. At my worst, being given numerous referrals in various departments that don't communicate with each other. (see image) I am super grateful for the NHS but I have experienced several factors as both a service user and provider.

My Cycles of NHS Referrals, Misdiagnosis & Ineffective Treatments

DIAGNOSTICS: Emotional Health Versus Mental Health & What I Taught

In my healthcare career, about twenty years ago, I served as a national healthcare trainer for large care providers. At that time, mental health training focused almost exclusively on conditions like schizophrenia, agoraphobia, and other severe psychiatric disorders. No one was discussing the grief of losing a pet or the overwhelm of everyday stress. Today, far too often, ordinary human emotions are treated as medical issues, which distorts how people experience and seek support.

Our current systems tend to medicalise emotional health, offering solutions that are expedient but often superficial. Such an approach may facilitate a return to work, but it frequently bypasses deeper underlying causes. Talk therapy is powerful and valuable, but when it comes to trauma such as PTSD or complex PTSD, the spoken word alone often cannot reach the amygdala, the fear-driven region of the brain.

As a result, many people remain in cycles of instability: medications can bring burdensome side effects, and therapy can feel insufficient. I’ve witnessed individuals whose lives have been ravaged by swings of emotion, fractured relationships & treatments that fail to heal underlying patterns. I was one of these statistics, which has been my motivation to serve others now after finally becoming 100% healthy.

GP surgeries are overwhelmed, waiting lists are long & when one does finally get an appointment the following is often the case: The GP is tired from many patient appointments and is barely looking at you. Their hearts are inthe right place but legislation to cover their backs requires endless form completion rather than old style semiotics (study of signs, to interpret and understand a patient's symptoms and clinical signs to reach a diagnosis. It is the systematic process by which a physician links observable signs of disease (like a fever or a rash) and reported symptoms (like pain) to an underlying pathology, or disease state. This involves collecting information through patient history and physical examination, interpreting the collective "signs," and synthesising them into a coherent understanding of the patient's condition. )

TREATMENTS & Learning from International Experts.

Experts like Sebern Fisher and Bessel van der Kolk in the field of developmental trauma, or Complex PTSD, have largely shifted their trauma-focused PTSD work to include neurofeedback. Their experience echoes mounting evidence of neurofeedback’s efficacy in helping the brain restore balance and resilience, particularly for those whose trauma is deeply embedded in neurological pathways.

Our current NHS diagnostic frameworks rely heavily on categorisation, labels that seldom reflect the role of brainwave dysregulation or how chronic stress rewires the nervous system. This gap leaves the root of many distress signals unaddressed.

Over-Arousal and Under-Arousal: Symptoms Mislabelled

Symptoms such as anxiety, panic, or irritable bowel syndrome often arise from over-arousal. Conversely, fatigue, disconnection, or depression can stem from under-arousal. Unfortunately, the system typically prices each symptom as a separate diagnosis, disconnected from the underlying neural dysregulation. This fragmented approach hinders comprehensive healing.

My own healing journey inspired RecaliBRAINtion® I experienced a life of cycles of symptoms, from sudden limb paralysis, temporary blindness in one eye to stuttering and IBS. Diagnoses of functional neurological disorder (FND) and complex PTSD would have been the outcome had i ‘entered’ into the NHS system I knew to avoid. I grappled with many physical, cognitive, emotional & neurological symptoms. Rather than immersing myself in long-term medications and talk therapy, I discovered recovery through neurofeedback, applied neuroscience. It defied illness / condition labels and works on regulating the nervous system via brain waves. Non invasive, non linear neurofeedback, NeurOptimal®. is what helped me and countless others to life once thought impossible: from virus prone to autistic, bipolar to borderline personality disorder, all the labels were thrown at me by medical professionals.

That experience ignited my mission: to support others toward well-being without diagnoses, but through addressing the brain's regulation itself.

A Call for Changing Paradigms

Despite neurofeedback being around for more than sixty years, it remains largely unknown in mainstream healthcare. During my eighteen years in the UK’s health system, from frontline care to national training, I never once came across it. That reflects how dominant the pharmaceutical model has become.

I am not anti-medication, but I am passionate about expanding what real care looks like & committed to a broader, neuroscience-informed approach, one that shifts treatment and diagnostic paradigms and truly addresses root-level brain and nervous system regulation.

At RecaliBRAINtion® my assessments take between 60-120 minutes minimum, are done over time to see you in different states and also never online, but only in person. I work with over 100 symptoms that encumbis most mental health conditions.

Learn more: see success reviews, the assessment process & neurofeedback on the pages or blogs.

RecaliBRAINtion® Neurofeedback