There are alternatives to medication.

If you have ended up on this page it is likely you are considering medication to alleviate your distress, anxiety, depression, mania, panic, or OCD- which are all symptoms that have a root cause. Or, you may already be taking medication and know that there is ‘another way’ of healing your mind and want to taper off medication.

You have made the right choice- and here are some facts to reinforce what you already know.

I know from personal experience that the first line of treatment for mental illness is psychotropic medications (psych meds). In fact according to BCC research The global sales for these medications are predicted to reach $40billion by 2025. Big pharma is driven by greed and is not interested in your mental wellbeing. These medications are often used in conjunction with psychotherapy such as cognitive therapy, behavioural therapy, interpersonal therapy and others. While these therapies are helpful they are usually offered as an adjunctive therapy to psychotropic medications- it is psych meds that are more often than not the first line of defence.

The drugs used to mask the symptoms of mental illness (they do not heal… which is an important point), target a hypothesised neurotransmitter imbalance in the brain, for example serotonin in a depressed individual. The problem with this is after decades of research they is still no good evidence that there are such chemical imbalances. Blood serotonin levels do not indicate brain serotonin and there is no way to measure this or other chemical neurotransmitters. These drugs cause serious side effects in most patients.

Therefore, we have to weigh up risk vs benefit.

John Rush was a lead investigator in the NIMH’s STAR*D study. This was hailed as the largest antidepressant study ever.  The study was meant to assess the effectiveness of antidepressants in real-world patients and actually had a design that could be expected to produce a higher response rate than usual in an RCT. Patients who didn’t respond to a first round of treatment could then have a second round with a different antidepressant, and so on through four courses of treatment. The idea was that eventually a treatment would be found that would work, with patients given multiple chances to register a HAM-D score  (which is the Hamilton scale of depression, a 17 item instrument used to rate depression ) of seven or below. Yet, even with this design, only 38 percent of the 4041 patients reached this level of improvement. But what is important is as this figure shows at the end of a year only 108 out of 4041 patients (3%) stayed well.

In 2006, Michael Posternak, a psychiatrist at Brown University, studied the one-year remission rate for unmedicated patients. To do his research, he identified 84 patients enrolled in an NIMH study who, after recovering from an initial bout of depression, subsequently relapsed but then did not go back on an antidepressant. He tracked their remission rate over time: 23 percent had recovered by the end of the first month; 67 percent at the end of six months; and 85 percent at the end of one year.

Posternak summed up his results in this way: “If as many as 85 percentage of depressed individuals who go without somatic treatment spontaneously recover within one year, it would be extremely difficult for any intervention to demonstrate a superior result to this.”

So, we have a plethora of medications aimed at correcting a hypothesised chemical imbalance in the brain, not much evidence that these drugs work, and a list of side effects longer than my arm.

But what if we were to reframe mental illness as an inflammatory disorder, birthed in trauma- which can be healed through nutritional therapy, movement, good sleep hygiene, mindfulness practices, inner child work, and so much more? How does that feel? I think it feels really empowering.

Below is a video that I made a while ago for another program, and feel it fits well here. Often we desperately want a quick fix to make us feel better, but sometimes we have to ride the wave and get through to the other side on our own.

The feelings don’t last.