Happy new year 2025 and seeing the light

I would like to wish everyone a happy 2025 filled with peace and happiness, health and vitality, abundance and joy!

Léo and I went to London for Christmas, leaving Luc in charge of the animals. If it weren’t for my mother in London, I wouldn’t choose to travel at Christmas because it always ends up being some version of overcrowded, sneezing, snorting, drunken, vomiting, foggy, stormy bedlam. Last Christmas both our outbound and inbound flights were delayed by named storms. This year, our return flight was delayed for five hours due to fog. When we finally arrived home at 3am, I felt as if I’d been run over by herd of rhinos, and hadn’t seen natural light for days.

Something that always strikes me is how early it gets dark in London in the winter; it’s not surprising there’s more SAD/depression in the northern latitudes. I recently read an enlightening book, ‘Change your Diet, Change your Mind’, by Dr Georgia Ede, a psychiatrist specialising in nutritional and metabolic psychiatry.

Metabolic psychiatry sees mental health challenges as problems rooted in brain metabolism. This perspective is gradually changing how doctors address mental health conditions and offers powerful, practical, and safe nutrition-based solutions, accessible to everyone. The approach also often ends up reducing or eliminating the need for psychiatric drugs.

In her book, Dr Ede says that for so many years, mental health issues were viewed as ‘chemical imbalances’ to be treated with medication (often SSRIs, tested on mice. How can you tell if a mouse is depressed?). While these drugs have helped many, their efficacy is often limited in both scope and time, and come with side effects like fatigue, weight gain, and sexual dysfunction.

A pasta-loving mouse

Talking of mice, there is a mouse that visits our cupboard to snack on raw tagliatelle (the tagliatelle is in a very noisy plastic bag, which now has lots of mouse-size holes). He always visits when I’m on the phone, and this morning I was on a very complicated call with the bank. The mouse was making so much noise burrowing amongst the tagliatelle in the noisy plastic bag that I had to repeatedly kick the cupboard door, really loudly, as I didn’t fancy a face-to-face confrontation. The bank employee ended up asking what the loud banging noise was, and I was forced to explain the rodent situation. The good news is that the bank conversation was delayed until I was ‘less preoccupied’; the bad news is that the mouse has become immune to my kicking.