Ask Your Real Doctor Part II
When it comes to Mental Health in America, it seems to me like people are just as confused over an effective healing strategy as they are over physical health. If you would like to read my views on the latter, please see the first part of this article in my blog. I must warn you though, if you found that article controversial and the arguments presented were counter to everything that you had previously thought, then you will find the following views even more disturbing.
Just as I am not an MD, I am also not a psychiatrist or mental health professional, although I do have a BSc in Psychology, so am not trying to give out advice, only information. It is my belief that mental health can be treated with Holistic therapies, just as physical health can. Most of my opinions and beliefs about mental health have come from my own experience as an individual, as a parent and through my work in education.
Just as the body from the neck down is a homeostatic system, or balanced mechanism which has evolved over millions of years, the brain is also an organ, and part of the whole biological system. Our brains are also the seat of memories and emotions which have an intimate relationship with our physical health. It is well known in medicine that mental and emotional stress, anxiety and depression affect our physical health, and vice-versa.
So how can we get rid of these mental-emotional stress? We can either take medications which only cover up the symptoms, and just like physically-focused meds, have side effects and cause dependency, or we can attack the causes of stress. What are the causes of stress? The answer is countless; relationships, parenting, peer pressure, work, bullying, poverty, social isolation etc. Another stressor is the stigma caused by actually being diagnosed as being less than normal in the first place (please see The Myth Of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz). This article cannot fix these huge social problems, but it can tell you how to diffuse their effect on you, and that is through meditation. If you haven't already picked up a copy of The Power Of Now by Eckart Tolle, this author combines thousands of years of spiritual philosophy about the human mind into one easy technique which will take humans to the next stage of our evolution.
Having said that I can't fix the social causes mental illness, one of these is so controversial in our current world that it deserves a mention, and that is the subject of recreational drugs. In my experiences a parent and substitute teacher in Los Angeles, I see that there is an "epidemic" of young people who are being diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder or Schizo-Effective Disorder, and these young people have all consumed large amounts of today's crops of marijuana, sometimes known as Skunk, which has levels of tetrahydrocannabinol or "THC" which are 5-10 times higher than they were in the 1960s and 70s when my generation and the music artists we idolized, like The Beatles, smoked it. In those days, it was rare to see anyone having an adverse effect to smoking marijuana, and this is why many of my generation objected to its status of illegality in the UK and US. But since then growers have bred the hemp plant to produce super concentrated THC buds which can and do cause psychosis and are so damaging to the brains of growing adolescents. Research at Kings College London suggests this causal relationship between Skunk and psychosis. Studies in Sweden have also shown that teenage use of marijuana is correlated to disability in later life, and a study from 1987 also showed that early marijuana use is correlated with a later schizophrenia diagnosis.
The cure for this sort of psychosis then, would logically be to STOP SMOKING IT. But what I have found after talking to parents of young people with this marijuana-related diagnosis is that the young people cannot stop smoking easily because they have become dependent on the "high", completely unaware that it is also causing psychotic side effects. Parents have become nervous wrecks themselves as their children's mental health deteriorates into a constant cycle of verbal and sometimes physical abuse. Sometimes adolescents are asked to leave home because the stress on parents is so bad, and the children have become homeless and unemployable. This is not what the Hippie generation ever imagined back in the 1960s.
Also, sometimes when young people are diagnosed after a manic episode, and perhaps an involuntary hospitalization under California's 5150 law, or the UK's sectioning protocols, and have been taking medication for a while, they stop taking their prescriptions and go back to smoking marijuana. This creates a very serious condition in their brains, leading to very bad psychoses, as witnessed by licensed social worker and PhD, Allan Schwartz in this article Marijuana Makes It Worse.
Of course not all mental illness is caused by marijuana, but where there is a predisposition to these illnesses, perhaps caused by genetics or childhood trauma, drugs and alcohol do not help long term in my opinion. They might temporarily relieve symptoms but with great danger of causing the addictive process to start. A much better solution is nutrition, counseling and study of some sort of spirituality which raises our consciousness above the material level. I have found astrology excellent in this regard.
And just as medications for the body have side effects, so do those for the mind. SSRIs for example, which are a class of drug used to treat depression, have very harmful consequences, including suicidal thoughts, bleeding and harm to the growing fetus. Prozac, for example, used to treat depression, has side effects including suicide and sexual dysfunction.Zyprexa, which is used to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder causes liver damage and weight gain and has had several law suits against its manufacturers, whereas Depacote, used to treat epilepsy and Bipolar Disorder can cause bleeding, liver damage, suicidal thoughts, stunted growth and low blood platelets.
In comparison, Holistic treatments for these conditions, such as Vitamin E, Omega 3s in Fish Oil, Vitamin B,Vitamin D, Vitamin C, a whole foods diet rich in essential nutrients, talk therapy such as CBT, meditation, social interaction, and ABSTINENCE from recreational drugs, have none of the above side effects, but our current crop of doctors and psychiatrists are not schooled in nutrition, and even if they were, the politics of our world economy has made it very doubtful that they would want to turn away from the system of huge profits which fuels the practice of Western medicine. This is why it is even more essential that people meditate and stay calm if they or their loved ones develop one of these lifestyle illnesses, to see through the big illusion of symptom based medicine and grasp the bigger picture of Holistic Health. Hopefully the illness - or imbalance - has not progressed to the stage where modern medicine is the only cure, but if not, this is an ideal time to Ask Your Real Doctor, which is the wisdom inside you gleaned from both scientific principles of biology and social principles of behavior, how to regain control of your own body and mind.
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