Dr. Ragnar

Addiction Treatment
Addiction is what happens when the brain's reward wiring gets dragged hard in one direction.
May 31, 2025
Hair loss: what works, what is hype
Finasteride, dutasteride, minoxidil, PRP, microneedling, transplants. The math of male pattern hair loss, the meds that bend it, and the things sold to you that mostly do not.
May 29, 2025
Pristiq (Desvenlafaxine)
Pristiq is what happens when you take Effexor, skip a metabolic step, and sell it as a new drug. That's not a dig, that's the actual mechanism.
May 27, 2025
Self-Harm in Adult Men
Self-harm in adult men is a thing we don’t talk about much, because the cultural picture of self-harm is a teenage girl with a razor and her arms,…
May 24, 2025
Body Dysmorphic Disorder in men
Body dysmorphic disorder in men is more common than most clinicians catch, and it shows up differently from how the textbook describes it because the…
May 22, 2025
The Difference Between Depression and Just Being Sad
Not every bad day is depression and not every hard week means you need medication.
May 21, 2025
Alcohol Use Disorder diagnostic criteria
Most guys who have alcohol use disorder don’t think they have it, because they think alcoholism means falling-down-drunk and missing work, and they’re not doing that. They’re functional,…
May 19, 2025
Sleep, Stress, and Your Brain
Sleep deprivation isn't something you can think your way out of. Chronic stress and five hour nights make everything else on your psych chart worse.
May 18, 2025
Complicated Grief / Prolonged Grief Disorder
Prolonged grief disorder made it into the DSM-5-TR (the most current version of the psychiatric diagnostic manual) in 2022, and the diagnosis is useful…
May 17, 2025
Burnout (ICD-11)
Burnout picked up an actual ICD-11 (the international diagnostic codebook used outside the U.S.) designation in 2019, and the conversation since then has…
May 14, 2025
PMDD (for the partners who live with it)
This one's for the husbands, because most of the guys who come in with a wife who has PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder, the severe, predictable mood…
May 11, 2025
Weight Management
The weight management conversation got rewritten in the last three years and most people still haven't caught up.
May 9, 2025