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natural treatment for depression

Can Supplements for Depression Beat Medication?

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Most cases of depression are treated with antidepressants in medicine today. But when talking natural depression treatments, St John’s Wort pops up first.

Certainly St. John’s Wort has a pretty good track history when it comes to battling depression, but are there any other supplements that can help?

Before I answer that, let’s cover a little bit on depression first.  Too often we think of it as some kind of “chemical imbalance,” despite the fact that there is absolutely no proof that any such entity exists.  Personally, I think the idea of an imbalance was fostered by the drug companies to increase the acceptance of medication designed to correct such an imbalance.  I mean really–do you think you were built with a shortage of Prosac?  Maybe at your moment of conception the gene that makes Paxil just didn’t make it?

Since we inherently know that this can’t be true, what goes wrong?

Well, there’s a couple of solid theories.  First and foremost is having healthy brain cells so that messages that are supposed to get out and into the cell get to where they are going.  A diet filled with unhealthy fats and devoid of healthy fats is going to leave your brain cells unable to effectively  communicate with its neighbors.  This is why there are numerous studies supporting dietary changes and omega 3 fats on depression have been published.  For a full review, feel free to check out my Depression Risk Factors eBook that can be found by clicking here.

Another bad situation for the brain is inflammation.  Anytime inflammation runs amok (unlike the controlled inflammation associated with something like a sprained ankle) the blood vessels suffer.  Once the blood vessels become inflamed the next stage is worsening brain health.  If your brain cells can’t get the nutrients they need, the same problem with communication mentioned above is going to occur.

Based on this information, what if we used a natural anti-inflammatory to treat depression, a brain cell based problem that is affected by inflammation?  You of course know where I’m going with this one.  In this particular study, researchers compared the natural anti-inflammatory curcumin (which is the most powerful compound found in the spice turmeric) to the popular antidepressant of the SSRI class fluoxetine (Prosac).  Here’s the details:

  1. 60 patients with MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER (important–this is not run of the mill gloomy that we’re talking about here).
  2. They were give fluoxetine (20 mg) and curcumin (1000 mg) individually or in combination for 6 weeks.
  3. Response was rated using the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, 17-item version (HAM-D17).
  4.  The response was highest in the combination group (77.8%) than in the fluoxetine (64.7%) and the curcumin (62.5%) groups.
  5. However,  the overall change in HAM-D17 score at the end of six weeks was comparable in all three groups.

Overall, the response to curcumin was equivalent to that of Prosac.  That’s where the similarities end.  The curcumin supplements were well tolerated (which we know that upwards of 38% of patients taking SSRIs experience side effects).  In addition, SSRI are linked to poor bone health and osteoporosis as well as the development of weight gain and diabetes.  Curcumin, on the other hand, has almost the opposite effects.

Seems like a good-brainer to me (get it?  Not a “no-brainer,” but a “good??”  Never mind….).  Anyway…let this be a reminder to avoid the high-fructose corn syrup ketchup and overload your food with mustard.

 

Teenage Depression Treatment w/ Drugs? 3 Things You Need to Know

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Somewhere along the way someone decided that teenage depression treatment using antidepressants was ok.  I understand that there are challenges and there may actually be a time and place for medicating our kids for psychological problems.

But certainly not at the rate we are medicating them today.  These drugs affect the way your brain functions.  YOUR BRAIN.  Yes–the center of who you or your child is.  YOUR BRAIN.

Any antidepressant drug is going to fundamentally change the way that an enzyme involved in a pathway in the brain performs.  And unless we choose to fool ourselves, we really have no idea whatsoever how our brains function.  Messing around in a developing brain just sounds like a bad idea.  But just how bad?  This particular article looks at just how much anti-depressants may effect a developing child’s brain.

First, a brief primer on the amygdala.

The amygdala is a region of the brain that is thought to be responsible for things like fear conditioning and the long term processing of memory.  Since it is responsible for fear conditioning, what do you think might happen if we blocked the action of receptors in the amygdala with antidepressants?  Of course you know where I’m going with this.

While this study was done on rats, the implications are pretty scary.  Basically, chronic use of antidepressants lowered the number of receptors on a certain region of the amygdala that receive the neurotransmitter NMDA.

Behaviorally, the chronic antidepressant rats lost the ability to learn fears needed to protect themselves.   We cannot directly transfer the results of this study to teenage depression treatment using antidepressants, but it should raise concern over just what we are doing to our kids’ brains when drugs that effect the neurotransmitters in the brain are given during a time of incredible brain development.

Further, consider the concerns over the tragedies that seem to occur at higher rates here in the US than other countries.  We like to vacation in Mexico, and yet we hear all the time about how dangerous it is in Mexico for tourists.  Do these people mean to say that in Mexico, with a much lower antidepressant use that the US, we hear stories of random teenagers shooting up schools, malls and movie theaters, killing absolutely innocent bystanders?

The answer is, of course, no.  The US clearly dominates the world in these types of random shootings.  At the same time, the US has a much higher (and climbing) rate of antidepressants use over other countries.  Now, we learn from this study that chronic antidepressant use has some type of effect on learning fear for self preservation.  To think that these thinks are NOT connected is wishful thinking.

If antidepressants seem to be a very bad idea for teenage depression treatment, what are some other options?  Here are some very powerful tools to help heal the brain:

  1. Exercise is likely the most powerful teenage depression treatment that we know of.
  2. Increase intake of healthier fats like wild caught fish, nuts and olive oil.
  3. Stress reduction via meditation, deep breathing, or tools such as the Resperate.

While there are never any promises, these simple steps can begin a process of healing the brain to get it to develop and function properly.