Mind Spa, 5340 S Quebec Street STE 230S, Denver, CO (2026)

09/10/2026

A Mental Health Diagnosis Doesn't Have to Be Your Future....

I had a patient come in for a routine EEG to check on her brain function post-treatment.

This patient had a history of depression, anxiety, and ADHD. After looking at her EEG, I turned to her and showed her that her brain was no longer showing any signals of ADHD or depression.

Her response floored me; she turned to me, with a slight look of panic in her eyes, and said, "I have kind of wrapped my whole identity around ADHD; what the hell am I supposed to do now?!"

This interaction underscores one of the many problems with mental health treatment in our country; we have a system that is set up to 'manage symptoms'; there is never talk of full recovery or change. And patients pay for it, big time.

We, as an industry, need to shift away from this constant use of medications to mask symptoms and get to the root cause of these conditions; otherwise, otehrwise our patients end up on a medical treadmill that the system doesn't want them to get off of- just some food for thought.

09/09/2026

Most people think of hyperbaric oxygen as fuel delivery. Tissue is starving, so push more oxygen into it. A trial published this year suggests that framing misses the real mechanism.

Researchers randomized 61 patients with post-stroke depression to four weeks of hyperbaric oxygen or sham. Double-blind. They tracked depression scores on the HAMD-17 (Hamilton Depression Rating Scale), stroke severity, and daily function. Then they added two blood markers: brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and beta-nerve growth factor.

Depression scores improved in the treated group at two and four weeks. BDNF and beta-NGF rose. The authors report the symptom improvement tracked with that rise (Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, February 2026).

They call it preliminary. They are right. Sixty-one people, four weeks, no long-term follow-up, and they say plainly that larger trials are needed.

But look at how it was built.

Double-blind and sham-controlled is rare in hyperbaric research, becasue it is difficult to fake increasing the pressure inside a vessel. A daily chamber dive is one of the most ritualized treatments in medicine. Attention, structure, and expectation all move symptom scores. Without a sham you cannot separate those from the oxygen.

And BDNF is not a comfort metric. It is the signal that tells neurons to grow, branch, and keep the connections they have. It drives plasticity in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Chronic stress suppresses it. Brain injury disrupts it. Low BDNF signaling shows up in depression research over and over.

So the mechanism question changes. It is no longer whether oxygen fills a tank. It is whether the swing between high and normal oxygen acts as a signal that switches repair programs back on.

That reframe matters for veterans, first responders, and the spouses watching them.

Fail multiple medications and you get labeled treatment-resistant. That label puts the problem inside the person.

It's more accurate to say the treatments tried so far never addressed what is wrong with the tissue and the signaling. A brain after blast exposure, repeated concussion, or years of chronic threat is not broken it needs to be healed

09/08/2026

If you want to change your life, stop chasing motivation. Target psychological flexibility.

Psychological flexibility is the ability to stay in contact with the present moment, notice what you are thinking and feeling, and still act on what matters to you instead of what you are trying to avoid. A 2010 review in Clinical Psychology Review argued that this capacity to recognize and adapt to situational demands and shift behavioral repertoires when they stop working is a core feature of psychological health, and the same review found these flexibility processes are absent in many forms of psychopathology.

This matters for our community. A study of returning combat Air Force personnel found that higher psychological flexibility protected against depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The flip side is avoidance. In the National Health and Resilience in Veterans Study, experiential avoidance was moderately correlated with depressive distress, trauma related distress, and health and cognitive dysfunction. Avoidance is the pattern. Flexibility is the exit.

So how do you build it? Do something different.

Rigid brains run rigid routines. Breaking a routine on purpose, even a small one, forces the brain to build a new pathway instead of running the old one. The simplest example is eating with your non dominant hand. It is a small thing, but the neuroscience is real. Motor training produced significant performance improvement in both hands, with significantly more improvement in the non dominant hand, and a follow up study found the increase in motor cortex excitability after training was 21 percent greater in the non dominant hand. The brain adapts fastest where it is least practiced.

Start there. Then apply the same principle to the routines that keep you stuck. Drive a different route. Sit in a different chair. Open the conversation you have been avoiding. Every time you do something different on purpose, you are training the skill of choosing your action instead of defaulting to it.

That is psychological flexibility and it is trainable.

09/03/2026

Using Psychedelics therapeutically without making behavior change is just glorified Dr*g use.

Neuroplastic agents help our brain cells to branch out and create new synaptic connections, which can help you think and interpret your environment in different ways.

However, if you are using neuroplastic agents like psychedelics without putting in the requisite work to change your habits and thought processes, you are kind of wasting your time.

True change requires a requisite sacrifice; in order to change who you are, you have to be willing to do the hard things and challenge your own perceptions to make different choices around your day-to-day life.

If you are waiting for ANY substance to magically change and improve your life, you’re going to be waiting for a LONG time.

The answers that you seek are behind the door that you most fear to open.

09/02/2026

Psychiatry research keeps running horse races between treatments. A trial published last week finally changed that.

Researchers randomized 72 post-stroke patients with vascular cognitive impairment into four groups: standard care, hyperbaric oxygen (HBOT) alone, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) alone, or both. Three weeks, five days a week. rTMS at 10 Hz over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, 2000 pulses a session. HBOT at 2.0 ATA, 60 minutes of oxygen per dive.

Every group improved. The combined group improved by roughly double.

Mean MoCA gain (Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a 30 point screen) was 5.9 with both treatments, 2.9 with HBOT alone, 2.7 with rTMS alone, 1.4 with standard care (Lin et al., Frontiers in Neurology, August 18, 2026).

Now there are some caveats.

No blinding. No sham chamber. Three weeks, no follow-up. Eighteen patients per arm. The imaging signal meant to explain the effect did not survive sensitivity analysis. Function and mood scales showed no advantage for the combination. And this was stroke, not PTSD, not blast TBI.

So why post it?

Because the design is the point. Interventional psychiatry almost always gets evaluated one modality at a time, as if the brain picks a winner. rTMS works at the circuit level. It drives activity in a specific network. HBOT works at the tissue level, through perfusion, mitochondrial function, and inflammatory signaling. Those are not competing explanations for why someone is not recovering. They are different floors of the same building.

A commentary in Medical Gas Research made the same case for depression and PTSD this year, and was honest that safety data on the combination is thin (Tlapak et al., Med Gas Res 2026;16:303-304).

For veterans and first responders who have failed multiple medications, the next question is not which single new thing to try. It is whether the plan addresses circuit function and tissue physiology at the same time, and whether anyone is measuring both.

09/01/2026

There Are No Silver B*llets In Mental Health, Just a Bunch of Golden Bee Bees

Especially in the mental health industry we “ and I mean both providers and patients “ seem to constantly be chasing the “ Silver B*llet” that one therapy to rule them all, that will heal the pain of those who are suffering.

The simple truth is that doesn’t exist. The brain is an incredibly complex system that requires a multi-pronged approach to make meaningful, lasting change.

Although treatments like ketamine are wonderful bridging therapies, they are there to provide a foundation for putting in the work to change.

08/27/2026

Are you a retired veteran who feels out of options when it comes to your mental health?

Have you tried multiple medication interventions that have failed to do anything but produce side effects?

If this sounds like you, we may be able to help.

At Mind Spa, we have developed a program designed to address the root cause of Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, and TBI, all at the same time.

Using the latest treatment technology like hyperbaric oxygen therapy and transcranial magnetic stimulation, our Inner Armor program directly targets the brain to finally get to the root cause of your symptoms, not just mask them.

If you feel like you're out of options and you've lost hope in the traditional medical establishment, come check out our program.

08/26/2026

Congress wants the VA to offer hyperbaric oxygen therapy to veterans with brain injuries. Then it asks charity to pay for it.

H.R. 1336, the Veterans National Traumatic Brain Injury Treatment Act, cleared the House Veterans' Affairs Committee on October 17, 2025. It directs the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to run a three year pilot of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) for veterans with traumatic brain injury (TBI) or PTSD through community providers.

Good so far. Then Section 2(d).

The bill creates a VA HBOT Fund. The sole source of money is donations.

Not appropriations. Donations.

The Congressional Budget Office priced the pilot at about $158 million over three years, roughly 6,000 veterans at $27,000 each, and noted donations would be minimal. The real offset is Section 4, which extends a cap on certain VA pension payments through 2034.

So the plan: pilot a treatment for brain-injured veterans, fund it with a donation jar, and balance the books by trimming pensions.

I get why. A real appropriation makes a bill hard to move. The donation fund keeps the score low and the bill alive.

The second problem is worse.

The committee's minority views record that it rejected an amendment requiring a systematic literature review before implementation.

That review matters because the evidence is split. A 2015 Government Accountability Office report found 32 peer-reviewed articles on HBOT for TBI and PTSD. For mild TBI, six said it did not work, two said it did. What constitutes a proper sham is a TED Talk for another time.

Since then the picture has moved. A sham-controlled randomized trial in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (2024) found 68 percent of veterans with combat PTSD met response criteria after 60 sessions, versus 4 percent on sham. Small trial, 28 per arm, TBI excluded. A 420-participant sham-controlled trial in veterans with mild to moderate TBI is now underway (NCT06581003).

That is a real question. It deserves a real pilot.

Fund it properly or do not call it a pilot. Require the literature review. Publish the outcomes, good or bad. Veterans have waited long enough.

08/17/2026

The FDA just cleared a PTSD treatment that starts by measuring the brain instead of guessing.

On June 11, Wave Neuroscience received 510(k) clearance (K260402) for its MeRT System as an adjunctive treatment for PTSD. It is the first personalized, biomarker-guided neuromodulation platform cleared for this diagnosis.

Standard TMS for depression runs pretty much the same protocol for almost everyone. A fixed frequency, commonly 10 Hz, aimed at the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. It helps a lot of people.

It also fails a lot of people, and the field has never been good at explaining why.
MeRT starts somewhere else. It records resting EEG, then runs that data through an algorithm that sets stimulation parameters to the individual's own brain activity. One protocol for every brain becomes one protocol built from the brain in front of you.

The evidence behind the clearance was a double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled multisite trial run with the Texas A&M Health Institute of Biosciences and Technology. The pilot phase enrolled 74 active-duty and retired service members. The test phase enrolled 158. The sponsor and its research partner report significant and clinically meaningful reductions in PTSD symptom severity.

For those of us who have been through the traditional medicine approach. we were handed a protocol, not a plan. It's a medication ladder, then an eight-week wait, and a shrug when it didn't work. Being called treatment-resistant when nobody measured your brain before choosing the treatment isn't a diagnosis as much as a process problem.

510(k) clearance means FDA found the device substantially equivalent to something already on the market. The predicate here was a MagVenture TMS system cleared for OCD. Clearance is not full premarket approval, and it is not an insurance coverage decision. The trial data has not appeared in a peer-reviewed journal yet, but it's on its way.

Clinicians, I want your read. What evidence would you need to see before EEG-guided targeting changes how you sequence care?

08/14/2026

Roughly 15 percent of former first responders still meet criteria for PTSD. Often, their access to support ended the day they turned in the badge.

New meta-analysis in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, and it is the first one to look specifically at what happens after people leave the job instead of while they are still in it.

Ten studies, twelve unique samples, all from high-income English-speaking countries, weighted toward police and fire.

Pooled point prevalence of PTSD among former first responders with general occupational exposure: 𝟭𝟱.𝟰%

Among those studied after a single major disaster: 𝟭𝟭.𝟴%

For rough context, NIMH puts past-year PTSD among U.S. adults at 𝟯.𝟲%, based on the National Comorbidity Survey Replication.

Point prevalence and past-year prevalence are not the same measure, so treat that as a rough comparison and not a clean multiple. Even discounted, the gap is not subtle.

The authors also could not pool lifetime prevalence. Too few studies had bothered to collect it. That absence is the finding underneath the finding. We have barely studied what happens to these people after they leave active service.

Here is why that matters more than the percentage.
While you are on the job, the support is imperfect but it exists. Peer support teams, department chaplains, an EAP number on the back of your ID, and a shift full of people who were on the same call and do not need any of it explained.

Retirement ends all of that in one day. The pension may show u, but the peer group doesn't. The identity that made the broken sleep and the constant scanning feel like a fair trade is gone too. The nervous system does not retire with your new schedule.

Twenty years of moving toward what everyone else moves away from can leave a threat detection system still calibrated for the job long after the job ended.

A quiet house does not reset it. Sometimes it gets louder, because the calls stop and there is nothing left to drown it out.

Link to the article in the comments.

Mind Spa

09/10/2026

09/09/2026

09/08/2026

09/03/2026

09/02/2026

09/01/2026

08/27/2026

08/26/2026

08/17/2026

08/14/2026

Address

Opening Hours

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Contact The Practice

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Listing takedown request