A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives

▶ Fear is an appropriate response to symptoms.

▶ We need chemicals to feel better.

▶ Doctors know what they are doing.

▶ The body is a machine requiring calibration (via drugs). A little too much of this, too little of that.

I call this collective set of notions the Western Medical Illusion. It sets up a vicious system that ushers you into life­long customer status, dependent and disempowered.

As you can likely guess by now, I love to rant. But I do so with the best evidence science can offer, and there’s a lot we know today about the real root causes of depression—­and how to treat the ­condition safely and successfully—­without a prescription pad. If there’s one lesson I will drive home, it’s this: shed the fear, take back your inner compass, and embrace a commitment to your best self, medication free. Even if you don’t already take a prescription drug, I bet you still doubt living the rest of your life prescription free and reliant on your own inner intuition to know what’s best for you. The idea of supporting your body’s innate wisdom may sound quaint at best, or like dangerous hippie woo-woo at worst. From now on, I want you to embrace these new ideas:

▶ Prevention is possible.

▶ Medication treatment comes at a steep cost.

▶ Optimal health is not possible through medication.

▶ Your health is under your control.

▶ Working with lifestyle medicine—­simple everyday habits that don’t entail drugs—­is a safe and effective way to send the body a signal of safety.

How can I make these statements, and what do I mean by lifestyle medicine? You’re going to find out in this book, and I’ll be presenting the scientific proof to answer questions you may have and to satisfy the doubtful. When I meet a woman and her family, I speak about how to reverse her anxiety, depression, mania, and even psychosis. We map out the timeline that brought her where she is and identify triggers that often fall under one or more of the following categories: food intolerances or sensitivities, blood sugar imbalances, chemical exposures, thyroid dysfunction, and nutrient deficiency. I forge a partnership with my patient and witness dramatic symptom relief within thirty days. I do this by teaching my patients how they can make simple shifts in their daily habits, starting with the diet. They increase nutrient density, eliminate inflammatory foods, balance blood sugar, and bring themselves closer to food in its ancestral state. It’s the most powerful way to move the needle, because food is not just fuel. It is information (literally: “it puts the form into your body”), and its potential for healing is a wonder to me, every single day.

Achieving radical wellness takes sending the body the right information and protecting it from aggressive assault. This isn’t just about mental health; it’s about how mental health is a manifestation of all that your body is experiencing and your mind’s interpretation of its own safety and power. It’s also about how symptoms are just the visible rough edges of a gigantic submerged iceberg.

Note that none of these concepts connects with substances in the brain that might be “low.” If you had to define depression right now, before reading further, chances are you’d say something about it being a “mood disorder” or “mental illness” triggered by a chemical imbalance in the brain that probably needs to be fixed through a medication like Prozac or Zoloft that will lift levels of brain chemicals associated with a good mood. But you would be mistaken.

So many patients today who are being shepherded into the psychiatric medication mill are overdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or mistreated. Indeed, they have “brain fog,” changes in metabolism, insomnia, agitation, and anxiety, but for reasons only loosely related to their brain chemicals. They have all the symptoms that are mentioned in a Cymbalta advertisement that tells them to talk to their doctor to see if Cymbalta is right for them. But it’s like putting a bandage over a splinter in the skin that continues to stir inflammation and pain. It’s absolutely missing an opportunity to remove the splinter and resolve the problem from the source. And it’s an iconic example of how conventional medicine can make grave mistakes, something the pharmaceutical industry is more than happy to encourage.

In holistic medicine, there are no specialties. It’s all connected. Here’s a classic case in point: Eva had been taking an antidepressant for two years but wanted to get off it because she was planning to get pregnant. Her doctor advised her not to stop taking the drug, which motivated her to see me. Eva explained that her saga had begun with PMS, featuring a week each month when she was irritable and prone to crying fits. Her doctor prescribed a birth control pill (a common treatment) and soon Eva was feeling even worse, with insomnia, fatigue, low libido, and a generally flat mood dogging her all month long. That’s when the doctor added the Wellbutrin to “pick her up,” as he said, and handle her presumed depression. From Eva’s perspective, she felt that the antidepressant helped her energy level, but it had limited benefits in terms of her mood and libido. And if she took it after midnight, her insomnia was exacerbated. She soon became accustomed to feeling stable but suboptimal, and she was convinced that the medication was keeping her afloat.

The good news for Eva was that with careful preparation, she could leave medication behind—­and restore her energy, her equilibrium, and her sense of control over her emotions. Step one consisted of some basic diet and exercise changes along with better stress response strategies. Step two involved stopping birth control pills and then testing her hormone levels. Just before her period, she had low cortisol and progesterone, which were likely the cause of the PMS that started her whole problem. Further testing revealed borderline low thyroid function, which may well have been the result of the contraceptives—­and the cause of her increased depressive symptoms.

When Eva was ready to begin tapering off her medication, she did so following my protocol. Even as her brain and body adjusted to not having the antidepressant surging through her system anymore, her energy levels improved, her sleep problems resolved, and her anxiety lifted. Within a year she was healthy, no longer taking any prescriptions, feeling good—­and pregnant.

I require my patients and I implore you to think differently about health-care decisions and consumerism. Part of my motivation in writing this book was to help you develop a new watching, questioning eye that you can bring to every experience. For my patients to be well, I know they will need to approach their health with an extreme commitment to the integrity of their mind and body. Personally, I have no intention of ever returning to a lifestyle that involves pharmaceutical products of any kind, under any circumstances.

Why?

Because we are looking at the body as an intricately woven spiderweb—­when you yank one area of it, the whole thing moves. And because there is a more powerful way to heal.

It’s so simple that it could be considered an act of rebellion.

You might think of yourself as averse to conflict—­someone who wants to keep the peace, keep your head low, and do what’s recommended. To be healthy in today’s world, however, you need to access and cultivate a reliance on yourself. And you’re going to do that by first shifting your perspective forever. Look behind the curtain and understand that medicine is not what you think it is. Drug-based medicine makes you sick. I will go so far as to say that hospital care makes you sick; though estimates vary, it’s reasonable to say that hospital care claims tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives annually due to preventable medical mistakes such as wrong diagnoses and medications or surgical errors, infections, and simply screwing up an IV.

The Cochrane Collaboration, a London-based network of more than 31,000 researchers from more than 130 countries, conducts the world’s most thorough independent analysis of health-care research. Based on data from the British Medical Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Centers for Disease Control, it has found that prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.

And when it comes to psychotropic drugs, the Cochrane Collaboration’s conclusions are compellingly uncomfortable. In the words of the Collaboration’s founder, Dr. Peter Gotzsche, “Our citizens would be far better off if we removed all the psychotropic drugs from the market, as doctors are unable to handle them. It is inescapable that their availability creates more harm than good.”

By and large, doctors are not bad ­people. They are smart ­individuals who work hard, investing money, blood, sweat, and tears into their training. But where do doctors get their information? Whom are they told to trust? Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings? Some of us in the medical community are beginning to speak up and to expose the fact that our training and education is, for the most part, bought.

“Unfortunately in the balance between benefits and risks, it is an uncomfortable truth that most drugs do not work in most patients.”

Before I read this quote in the prestigious British Medical Journal in 2013, I had already begun to explore the evidence that there really isn’t much to support the efficacy of most medications and medical interventions, particularly in psychiatry, where suppressed data and industry-funded and ghostwritten papers hide the truth. Another 2013 study published in the equally respected Mayo Clinic Proceedings confirmed that a whopping 40 percent of current medical practice should be thrown out.

Unfortunately, it takes an average of seventeen years for the data that exposes inefficacy and/or a signal of harm to trickle down into your doctor’s daily routine, a time lag problem that makes medicine’s standard of care evidence-based only in theory and not practice.

Dr. Richard Horton, the editor ­in ­chief of the much-revered Lancet at this writing, has broken rank and come forward about what he really thinks about published research—­that it’s unreliable at best, if not completely false. In a 2015 published statement, he wrote: “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

In 2011 the British Medical Journal performed a general analysis of some 2,500 common medical treatments. The goal was to determine which ones are supported by sufficient reliable evidence.

The results:

▶ 13 percent were found to be beneficial

▶ 23 percent were likely to be beneficial

▶ 8 percent were as likely to be harmful as beneficial

▶ 6 percent were unlikely to be beneficial

▶ 4 percent were likely to be harmful or ineffective

The treatments in the remaining 46 percent, the largest category, were found to be unknown in their effectiveness. Put simply, when you visit a doctor or hospital, you have only a 36 percent chance that you’ll receive a treatment that has been scientifically proven to be either beneficial or likely to be beneficial. Such results are strikingly similar to those of Dr. Brian Berman, who analyzed completed Cochrane reviews of conventional medical practices, finding that 38 percent of treatments were positive and 62 percent were negative or showed “no evidence of effect.”

Are there exceptions? I would like to argue that there aren’t. This is because the whole pharmaceutical approach is predicated on wrong-headed information. Pharmaceutical products as we know them have not been developed or studied with modern science’s most relevant principles in mind, such as the complexity and power of the human microbiome, the impact of low-dose toxic exposures, autoimmune disorders as a sign of environmental overstimulation, and the fundamental importance of individual biochemistry. Because medicine operates under the now antiquated one gene, one illness, one pill rubric, efficacy will be measured through a skewed lens, and safety cannot be accurately assessed or discussed with ­individual patients.

Many of us move through life with a sneaking fear that the other health shoe could drop at any moment. We can easily fall prey to the belief that our breasts are ticking time bombs, that infections are just a cough or handshake away, and that life is a process of adding more medications and drugs to put out small fires as we age. Before I stopped prescribing, I had never once cured a patient. Now ­people are cured every week in my practice. As I mentioned, my patients are my partners. We collaborate, and they work hard. They work hard at a time when they feel they can’t even lift a finger—­when the prospect of walking to the drugstore with a slip of paper twinkles like the North Star in their dark sky. They follow my lead because they feel inspired by my conviction and hope in this new model—­one that asks the question “Why?” and has the goal of not only symptom relief but an incredible boost in their vitality.

I realize that many of you reading this book may fear the change that will happen if you take my advice seriously. But no situation has ever been more easily resolved, better handled, or supported by freaking out. Responding with fear leads us to make decisions that are myopic. Some of these decisions may ease our sense of disorder, but they simultaneously engender new and more complex problems. Instead, when you have a symptom—­when you feel cloudy, sad, sore, gassy, weepy, tired, or unnecessarily anxious—­bring some wonder to it. Ask why and try to make the connections. Your body’s symptoms are telling you something about equilibrium. Your body is trying to tell you that it has lost balance. Stand back and appreciate the infinite complexity of your organism. Know that fear will only drive you to treat your body like a robotic machine that needs oil and gear changes. We are so much more than buttons and levers.

So it’s time to put on some new glasses and start to study your body. Start to think critically about what you buy, the medical advice you take, and what the media tells you to worry about. Let light shine on every dark corner of your beliefs about health. This critical thinking will liberate you to realize your full potential as a parent, spouse, or friend, and within your own sphere of existence. As one of my favorite quotes goes: “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”

In the rest of this chapter, we’re going to take a tour of what depression is—­from its true definition and biology to its myriad causes and the colossal failure of the pharmaceutical industry to treat this health challenge that has swiftly become the leading cause of disability in America and the rest of the world.

This will help ease your fears about the change that you’re about to make and set the stage for the balance of the book. And I’ll start with one of the most pervasive and harmful myths about depression.

DEPRESSION IS NOT A DISEASE

Psychiatry, unlike other fields of medicine, is based on a highly subjective diagnostic system. Essentially you sit in the office with a physician and you are labeled based on the doctor’s opinion of the symptoms you describe. There are no tests. You can’t pee in a cup or give a drop of blood to be analyzed for a substance that definitely indicates “you have depression” much in the way a blood test can tell you that you have diabetes or are anemic.

Psychiatry is infamous for saying “oops!” It has a long history of abusing patients with pseudoscience-driven treatments and has been sullied by its shameful lack of diagnostic rigor. Consider, for example, the 1949 Nobel Prize winner Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist who introduced invasive surgical techniques to treat ­people with schizophrenia by cutting connections between their prefrontal region and other parts of the brain (i.e., the prefrontal lobotomy). And then we had the Rosenhan experiment in the 1970s, which exposed how difficult it is for a doctor to distinguish between an “insane patient” and a sane patient acting insane. Today’s prescription pads for psychotropic drugs are, in my belief, just as harmful and absurd as physically destroying critical brain tissue or labeling ­people as “psychiatric” when really they are anything but.

My fellowship training was in consultation-liaison psychiatry, or “psychosomatic medicine.” I was drawn to this specialization because it seemed to be the only one that acknowledged physical processes and pathologies that could manifest behaviorally. I noticed that psychiatrists in this field appreciated the role of biological actions such as inflammation and the stress response. When I watched fellow psychiatrists consult on surgical patients in the hospital, they talked about these processes much ­differently from when they saw patients in their Park Avenue offices. They talked about delirium brought on by electrolyte imbalance, symptoms of dementia caused by B

deficiency, and the onset of psychosis in someone who was recently prescribed antinausea medication. These root causes of mental challenges are far from the “it’s all in your head” banter that typically swirls around conversations about mental illness.

The word psychosomatic is a loaded and stigmatized term that implies “it’s all in your head.” Psychiatry remains the wastebasket for the shortcomings of conventional medicine in terms of diagnosing and treating. If doctors can’t explain your symptoms, or if the treatment doesn’t fix the problem and further testing doesn’t identify a concrete diagnosis, you’ll probably be referred to a psychiatrist or, more likely, be handed a prescription for an antidepressant by your family doctor. If you are very persistent that you still need real help, your doctor might throw an antipsychotic at you as well. Most prescriptions for antidepressants are doled out by family doctors—­not psychiatrists, with 7 percent of all visits to a primary-care doctor ending with an antidepressant prescription.