E-SEP-NEI-FSG - Holistic Integrative Medicine

Why Your Therapist Should Check Your Stool and Cortisol Levels Before Talking About Your Childhood

Where do I even start?

Psychiatrists deal with the Psy: emotions, moods, cognitions—everything that spins inside the sphere of the Mind and expresses itself through actions and behavior. 🤓Philosophers also deal with the Psy, but mostly in the endless Rumination Loop of the Mind—a kind of meta-psychiatry. Psychiatrists stay grounded in clinical work, observation, and theory of mind (interpreting others’ thoughts, feelings, and intentions). They acknowledge a neuro substrate, at least when prescribing psychotropic drugs. Yet, as physicians, they often seem to forget that the subject of their analysis is embodied—has a body that supports its neuro-psy.
Neurologists deal with neurology—everything related to the nervous system that they can actually see on EEGs, scans, fMRIs, neuro tests, and electrical stimulation. When they see nothing, they declare the problem “not neurological” and send the patient to a psychiatrist, who will then treat the psychological signs without any reference to embodiment.
Old-school neuropsychiatrists used to play both roles—neuro and psycho—and didn’t spend years tossing the patient back and forth like a hot potato.

Sociologists study social relationships from the solitary individual to the family, tribe, race, belief system, all the way to society inside its ecosystem.
Ethologists observe visible (or at least perceptible) behavior and know there are phylogenetic (genetic + epigenetic) and ontogenetic components shaped by the ecosystem.
Behaviorists look horizontally at individuals acting and interacting, without ever asking whether an internal state—homeostasis, resilience, cortisol—might be influencing the picture. They happily talk about “stress cortisol” without knowing anything about the embodiment of stress. And they don’t need to decode the psyche; applying learning laws is enough for them.

You can spend an entire career—write books on education, behavior, sociology, psychiatric (pseudo-)medicine, philosophy of psychology—without ever knowing what a cell is, what DNA does, or what mitochondria are. You can stay in the Cartesian idea of separate floors: Psy here, Physics there. It’s easier. It’s reductionist. And therefore it’s wrong.

The scandal of the nail in the shoe

Step on a nail, get stung by a bee, bitten by a dog, catch one nasty virus (instead of the 2,000 we inhale every minute), pick up a bad bug in the gut (among the hundred trillion residents), joyfully accept an injection of an irritating “beneficial” substance… and the body reacts. The organism gets stressed, tries to return to survival balance—and, if possible, to well-being. And that changes how the being is and acts, i.e., its psycho-etho-socio level.

Every disruption of homeostasis shows up at the psycho-etho-socio level.

Fever of 104 °F, shaking, near-convulsions, zero motivation to work.
“Are you lazy?”
“No, I’m sick, I have 104 °F, I’m in bed, sweating buckets, vomiting my guts out, I think I’m dying!”

Or chronic demotivation at work that the psycho-socio level can’t explain.
“You’re lazy!”
“No—I’m exhausted, brain fog, I can barely move, my cortisol is flat, testosterone in the basement, even my libido forgot to wake up weeks ago…”

Isn’t it obvious—at least to me—that the neuro-endocrino-immuno level has a considerable, sometimes decisive, influence on the psycho-etho-socio (and even philosophical) level?

The model that changes everything: [GSF → NEI → PSE]E

Everything fits inside this sphere. Genetics → Structure → Function.
From that emerges Neuro-Endocrino-Immuno.
From that emerges Psycho-Etho-Socio.
All of it bathed in Eco.

Or, mirrored: E-SEP-NEI-FSG.
I see it as spinning tops turning in different directions, endlessly mixing the colors of GSF, NEI, and SEP. The tops never stop—because if one stops, the being dies.

The foundation is genetics-structure-function.
The entire program is contained in the two cells that wriggle toward each other (sperm and egg) to form the SuperCell. Two meters of DNA packed into a 3-micron nucleus plus mitochondrial DNA contain all the codes, all the algorithms, all the laws of the 3D/time universe and chaos.

Genetics codes for structure. Structure codes for function.
Function gives rise to so-called emergent properties. GSF → NEI → PSE.
No escape.

That SuperCell multiplies and differentiates into 5–10 trillion cells of a thousand different types. The blob is anything but undifferentiated: fingers grow from hands, not from the liver. For the left big toe to know what the liver is doing and what the mouth is saying, information must flow—electrical, electromagnetic, chemical, biochemical.
That’s the Neuro-Endocrino-Immuno layer.
From there emerges movement, behavior, reproduction—the whole reason the being moves to disseminate its encrypted code.

Why ignoring one layer makes the diagnosis wrong

Look at the brains of neurodivergent vs. neurotypical people: networks, matrices, hubs, connectomes, and EM waves are not the same. They vary along a Gaussian spectrum.
Is the psyche emergent from the fine structure of the neuro?
I dare say yes.

Having worked extensively on the genetics of behavior and psychological traits, I can state that genetics (modulated by epigenetics) codes for the structure of the organism in all its parts. Humans have five fingers, eyes in the head, liver in the belly—and when humans reproduce, they don’t give birth to bonobos.

Serial logical thinking depends on serially connected neurons. Arborified thinking depends on tree-like connections. Seeing patterns where others see noise depends on how divergent neurons are wired.
Emotions are just labels we put on sensations—and those sensations depend on the (a)typical wiring of networks.
In neurodivergent individuals the Salience network is particularly bad at filtering sensory information; it dumps everything into emotional networks, which overload the prefrontal cortex, which then shuts down to avoid meltdown.

And the neuro is not just electrical wiring: its structure and functions are primarily chemical, influenced by roughly 100,000 operations per second per cell × 10 trillion cells.
Incalculable complexity.

Dive into complexity, damn it

For a psychologist, behaviorist, or sociologist, it’s obviously easier to stay on your own floor. Easier. Reductionist. Wrong.

Psychologists themselves say that confronting complexity is good for keeping the brain sharp.
Psycho, socio, etho are windows open onto the world of the Being.
Don’t hesitate—dive into the unknown and complexity.
You might be amazed at the tools you’ll discover to help the Being simply be, be well, be better—or just accept itself as it is.

We must consider the Being in all its facets, all its layers, integrated, with millions of feedback loops, feed-forward loops, horizontal, vertical, and transverse transactions… infinite.

As a neurodivergent veterinary behaviorist…

My entry point into the Being is the Socio-Etho-Psycho-Neuro layer, to which I quickly added GSF and PNEI.
I am neurodivergent. That probably explains a lot. 😉
It probably explains why I cannot understand how most of my colleagues—veterinary or human—stay confined to their own floor, or even to one room on that floor if they are ultra-specialists.

How can anyone claim to understand and treat the Psy without looking at the brain, the hormones, the nail in the shoe, the ingrown toenail, the parasite burrowing in the neurons or the gut?

The day medicine stops slicing the animal into disciplinary pieces, we will finally start healing whole Beings.

Brussels, November 22, 2025: Joël Dehasse, November 23 : Joël Dehasse & Grok 4