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

For someone like me, this is a profound summary of the perspectives I have curated since my departure from conventional practice. The call to action is to view depression as the vague descriptive term that it is. Put simply, depression is a sign for us to stop and figure out what’s causing our imbalance. Another way to appreciate this perspective is to say depression is an opportunity.

Many of my patients are initially surprised to experience my wrath about the prescribing that’s going on all around me. I don’t think New York is any different from Anytown USA in how heavy-handed the average practitioner, whether it’s a family practice doctor or an internist or psychiatrist, is with prescriptions. In my opinion, it has become reckless. Their patients have never consented to the long-term effects of these medications because pharmaceutical research is, by nature, short­ term.

There’s no incentive on the part of the pharmaceutical companies to take a good look at what happens to the average individual when she takes a medication for a decade or so. That said, in recent years there’s been a spat of studies linking antidepressants to an increased risk of aggression, homicide, and suicide, as well as fingers pointed at these drugs for their involvement in school shootings, airplane crashes, and other unfortunate events often blamed on terrorists, gun access, or lack of treatment.

In one particularly alarming paper published in 2015 in no less an authority than the British Medical Journal, researchers from the Nordic Cochrane Centre, an independent drug safety analysis group based in Denmark, found that more than half a million ­people aged sixty-five and older in the West die every year from psych meds.

Using an impressive meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials, these researchers discovered that more patients die from taking FDA-approved antidepressants than do patients who take no drugs or who use other unconventional treatment methods. Similarly, the all-cause mortality rate (translation: dying from any cause) was found to be 3.6 percent higher among patients who take newly approved antidepressants compared to patients who take no antidepressants. The study’s scientists highlighted the fact most industry-funded studies favoring psych meds tend to skew the sample groups and test data so much that the results end up becoming meaningless. Underreporting of deaths, according to the study’s authors, is another major problem in the clinical trial process. The Nordic group estimates that the suicide rate among antidepressant users is some fifteen times higher than what the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports publicly.

Studies like this that uncover our modern medical assault on humanity are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I could write a whole book on the high-profile research demonstrating that patients are held hostage by psychiatric medications, made sicker, and convinced that neither is true. They are more likely to experience a worsening of their depression, as these drugs have been proven in rigorous studies to be mood destabilizers (contrary to what conventional wisdom says).

I should also add that they’ve recently been labeled as carcinogens.

In a major review published by the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, a group of researchers from a variety of institutions including Tufts University, Harvard University, and the University of Parma in Italy reported that the vast majority of psychotropic drugs can cause cancer in animals.

Although the animal-based results are not enough to draw definitive conclusions in humans, these same animal studies are often used to justify drug and chemical safety, and therefore they are enough to warrant caution and appropriate informed consent. Unfortunately, these conversations are not happening.

Don’t panic if you’re taking an antidepressant now.

The information in this book will help you take control of this symptom once and for all, and if tapering is right for you, I’ll be sharing my personal guide for doing just that in Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo). For now, accept the fact that we are all designed for depression as humans. It can be a warning sign that something isn’t right within. And just as we are designed to feel glum, we are also designed to self-heal and feel great.

DEPRESSION ISN’T GENETIC, IT’S EPIGENETIC

One of my favorite practice-changing papers was a 2003 case report of a lifelong vegetarian who experienced a month and a half of progressively worsening depression.

Eventually she began to hear voices and feel paranoid. The fifty-two-year-old postmenopausal woman ultimately became what’s called catatonic, which meant she was awake and alive but nonresponsive, and largely in an otherwise vegetative state. One would automatically assume this was a serious case of severe pathology. She was treated with electroconvulsive therapy and antipsychotics to no avail. And then she was transferred to another hospital, where they happened to test her levels of vitamin B

. They found that she was a tad on the low side, and after receiving a vitamin B

injection, she fully recovered. Coincidence? I think not. While it may be one of the more extreme cases, it’s emblematic of how a simple but critical deficiency can be at the causal root of psychiatric manifestations. Later on, we’ll see how vitamin B

deficiency has long been implicated in the development of depression. It’s a classic example of how we are not just puppets at the mercy of our encoded DNA, but rather products of the complex interactions between our genes and our environment. And it’s now well established that our health outcomes are dominated more by our environment than our inheritance. As I like to remind my patients, depression is epigenetic, not genetic.

Even though genes encoded by DNA are more or less static (barring the occurrence of mutation), the expression of those genes can be highly dynamic in response to environmental influences. This field of study, called epigenetics, is now one of the hottest areas of research. Epigenetics, defined more technically, is the study of sections of your DNA (called “marks,” or “markers”) that essentially tell your genes when and how strongly to express themselves. Like conductors of an orchestra, these epigenetic marks control not only your health and longevity, but also how you pass your genes on to future generations. Indeed, the forces acting on the expression of your DNA today can be passed on to your future biological children, affecting how their genes behave in their lives and whether or not their children will face a higher risk of certain diseases and disorders, depression included. But, by the same token, these marks can be changed to read differently, making it fully possible to reverse certain diseases.

We in the scientific community believe epigenetic forces affect us from our days in utero until the day we die. There are likely many windows during our lifetime when we are sensitive to environmental impacts that can change our biology and have major downstream effects such as symptoms of depression. At the same time, the multitude of neural, immune, and hormonal actions that are controlled by the microbiome—­and that in turn command our entire physiology—­are susceptible to disruption and adaptation, especially by environmental changes.

One of the most important takeaways from this first chapter is to understand that depression is not about the brain per se. Of course, there are brain events and biochemical reactions occurring when a person feels depressed, but no research has ever established that a particular brain state causes, or even correlates with, depression. Many different physical conditions create psychiatric symptoms but aren’t themselves psychiatric. We think (because our doctors think) that we need to “cure” the brain, but in reality we need to look at the whole body’s ecosystem: intestinal health, hormonal interactions, the immune system and autoimmune disorders, blood sugar balance, and toxicant exposure. And we need natural, evidence-based alternatives to psychiatric medications—­treatments that target what’s really awry in our bodies. That means strategic dietary supplementation and noninvasive remedies like light therapy and cranial stimulation, but also smart (i.e., biologically compatible) food protocols and exercise choices, restful sleep, a detoxed environment, and meditation/relaxation practices. The best way to heal our brains is to heal the bodies in which they reside. Or, as I also like to put it, free your mind by healing your whole body. Hence the whole purpose of this book. The potential for lifestyle-based interventions and healing is immense.

When I get asked about the main triggers of depression, I often think of the three types of patients I generally see: the woman with blood sugar issues and nutritional deficiencies due to the standard American diet (high in sugar, low in healthy fats); the individual with a misbehaving thyroid, which plays into all matters of hormones that in turn affect mental health; and the person with either medication-induced depression (think statins, birth control pills, proton-pump inhibitors like Nexium and Prilosec, and even vaccines). We’re going to be exploring all of these potential triggers in detail in the upcoming chapters.

Although scientists are now trying to identify drivers of different types of depressive syndromes, the medical industry still offers a one-size-fits-all solution (read: one drug, one disorder model). This is akin to studying all the different sources of, say, back pain—­from a torn muscle or a herniated disc to cancer or a kidney infection—­but using the same treatment protocol on all cases. It doesn’t make sense, and there can be unintended consequences if that singular treatment entails risky drugs or surgery. And when it comes to using antidepressants for all signs of depression, this can be very tricky terrain, as the next chapter shows.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_004bcebb-059c-5504-9802-ff205758bd27)

Truth Serum: Coming Clean About the Serotonin Myth (#ulink_004bcebb-059c-5504-9802-ff205758bd27)

How You’ve Been Misled, Misdiagnosed, and Mistreated

There’s no such thing as an antidepressant.

_____

The chemical imbalance theory of depression is heavily promoted but remains unfounded.

Do you take antidepressants? Do you know someone who does? Maybe you even have friends and family members who swear they have been lifesaving. Antidepressants might seem like a reasonable option, particularly if things are dire. But do you know the whole story?

At the risk of sounding extreme, let me give you an example from my own case files that sets the tone for this chapter. Kate had never been on an antidepressant and never suffered from depression, but she felt overwhelmed and frazzled after the birth of her first baby. At her six-week postpartum follow-up appointment, her obstetrician prescribed Zoloft. Within one week of starting it, she had written a suicide note and was planning to jump off of her fifteenth-floor Manhattan balcony. She said to me, “It just made sense at the time. And I felt really detached about it, like it was nothing.”

Kate’s experience is not an outlier. She is among millions of women who are reflexively prescribed medication for symptoms of distress. She’s also among those who have serious side effects that may seem like part of the depression—­not a result of the drugs. Rather than examining the sources of her postpartum plight, Kate found herself in dangerously unfamiliar territory in the name of treatment. If only she had known the whole story before deciding to fill that prescription.

The ease with which these medications are dispensed is partly why so many take them: 11 percent of all Americans, 25 percent of whom are women in their forties and fifties. The use of antidepressants has increased almost 400 percent from 1998 to 2008, making them the third most commonly prescribed drugs across all ages. The sharp increase does not necessarily signify a depression epidemic. Through the early 2000s pharmaceutical companies aggressively tested antidepressants for a variety of disorders, which led to an explosion of FDA-approved uses, from depression to premature ejaculation.

Believe it or not, we are spending more on antidepressants than the gross national product of more than half of the world’s countries. Sixty percent of ­people on antidepressants stay on them for more than two years, and 14 percent do so for more than a decade. By a conservative estimate, 15 percent of pregnant women take psychiatric medication today, a rate that has tripled in just the last ­couple of years.

The medical industry isn’t selling a cure. They are selling sickness.

SELLING SICKNESS

Is there a connection between the profligate use of antidepressants and increasing rates of disability? Before antidepressants became so widely used, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) ­assured ­people that recovering from a depressive episode was common and that experiencing a second episode was uncommon.

But then how do we explain soaring rates of disability and ­escalating prescriptions?

Robert Whitaker, a notable critic of modern psychiatry and author of Anatomy of an Epidemic and Mad in America, has compiled and analyzed data showing that days of work lost are not decreased by medication treatment.

Much to the contrary, they are increased by drug treatment, and so is long-term disability. He also has reported on studies showing that ­people treated for the illness are three times more likely than the untreated individuals to suffer a “cessation” of their “principal social role,” meaning that they function less optimally. And they were nearly seven times more likely to become “incapacitated.” Moreover, 85 percent of unmedicated patients recover in a year, with 67 percent doing so by six months.

From my perspective, that’s an enviable statistic.

What’s going on here? In the past half century, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—­the DSM, the bible of diagnosable disorders in psychiatry—­has lengthened to more than three hundred diagnoses in its fifth edition. In 1952 the DSM was a slim 130 pages and outlined 106 illnesses. Today’s version is a colossal 886 pages and includes 374 diagnoses. It encompasses a general consensus by a committee consisting of practitioners with profound conflicts of interest and pharmaceutical enmeshments.

As Dr. Allen Frances of Columbia University and author of Saving Normal states: “Wholesale imperial medicalization of normality that will trivialize mental disorder and lead to a deluge of unneeded medication treatment—­a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry but at a huge cost to the new false positive patients caught in the excessively wide DSM-V net.”

Dr. Frances is the psychiatrist who chaired the task force that produced the fourth edition of the DSM and has been critical of the latest tome. In 2013, Frances rightfully said that “psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests.”

When you look at the impossibly long list of symptoms and maladies for which antidepressants can be prescribed, it’s practically farcical. These drugs are indicated for classic signs of depression as well as all of the following: premenstrual syndrome, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), bipolar disorder, anorexia and binge eating, pain, irritable bowel, and explosive disorders fit for anger management class. Some doctors prescribe them for arthritis, hot flashes, migraine, irritable bowel syndrome, and panic disorder. The fact that antidepressants can be prescribed to treat arthritis, an inflammatory disease of the joints, undermines any beliefs about their ability to precisely correct a chemical imbalance at the root of everything from phobias to bulimia and melancholic depression. The condemning 2015 paper by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that I discussed in the previous chapter clearly states that antidepressants are used willy-nilly.

In their study, the authors conclude that most ­people who take antidepressants never meet the medical criteria for a bona fide diagnosis of major depression, and many who are given antidepressants for conditions like OCD, panic disorder, social phobia, and anxiety don’t actually have these conditions.

Let’s not forget the use of these medications in young ­children. And they are prescribed not only for depression but behavioral issues such as inattention, temper tantrums, tics, autism, and impaired thinking. How did we ever come to think that this could be a safe and effective treatment for two-year-olds still in diapers who don’t even speak in full sentences yet? For starters, consider Study 329, which cost GlaxoSmithKlein $3 billion for their ­efforts to promote antidepressants to youngsters.

This drug ­company manipulated data that hid signs of increased risk of suicide. The company also falsely represented Paxil as outperforming a placebo.

Among the most celebrated and respected thought leaders in my field is Joanna Moncrieff. She is a senior lecturer in psychiatry at University College London and co-chair of the Critical Psychiatry Network, a group of psychiatrists who dispute the generally accepted model of depression and seek alternative approaches to psychiatry. In a seminal 2006 paper, “Do Antidepressants Cure or Create Abnormal Brain States?” Moncrieff and her coauthor write: “Our analysis indicates that there are no specific antidepressant drugs, that most of the short-term effects of antidepressants are shared by many other drugs, and that long-term drug treatment with antidepressants or any other drugs has not been shown to lead to long-term elevation of mood. We suggest that the term ‘antidepressant’ should be abandoned.”

At this point, you might be wondering: Where did antidepressants come from and how did they get so popular?

A MEME IS BORN