MindFreedom member Sue Westwind explores the intersection between what are typically called "nutritional" or "orthomolecular" and a wholistic approach to mental and emotional recovery.

"Bridging Between Alternatives: Notes Toward a Unity of Mind, Body & Spirit."

Date Published: 2007-08-01 02:00

Author: by Sue Westwind

    Tried and true alternatives for mental health recovery exist along a varied and rewarding trail I like to call The Nutrient Path.  A broad term, including the use of vitamins and supplements, dietary changes and detoxification methods, it can also encompass attention to such things as sleep, light, spirituality and relationships. Any technique based on nourishment of the individual fits.  What doesn’t fit is viewing the person as a machine with separate, unconnected components. The Nutrient Path also posits the person as basically good, not a seething brute underneath it all who must struggle to control the competing forces of ego and id.

Unsung heroes

    The ancestor of this approach is Orthomolecular Medicine. There are grandfathers in this movement that bucked the medical model and left a body of significant work. One is Abram Hoffer, MD, a Canadian who was a practitioner then administrator in the mental health system when he began to experiment with Vitamin B3 (niacin) for schizophrenia. The results with both children and youth were exciting but the research money was headed elsewhere: into Pharma’s coffers. Vitamins could not be patented, and the system was somewhat embarrassed by Dr. Hoffer’s talk about vitamins.  The good doctor left in disgust, took to private practice where he helped many over the decades, ran follow-up projects to show that the healing held, and wrote several books still in print and pertinent.

    Another prolific researcher/writer and brave soul was Dr. Carl Pfeiffer (Nutrition and Mental Illness).  After his research dollars in the system dried up he founded the Brain Bio Center in Princeton, New Jersey.  Dr. Pfeiffer’s discovery about B6 and zinc—“pyroluria”--was a major contribution. He studied and helped not only schizophrenics,  but what was then termed “juvenile delinquents,” coming up with nutrient profiles for four types that key specific toxic-metal load and nutritional deficiencies to varying violent or anti-social behavior. In our time, these ideas have been favorably tested with diet and supplements in high schools and prisons.

Today the Pfeiffer Treatment Center in Chicago carries on his work. Head scientist William Walsh, along with MDs, nutritionists, and psychiatrists all dedicated to nutrient therapy made breakthroughs on the autism-ADHD epidemic, and continue to treat all so-called mental illnesses and behavior disorders in adults and children from all over the world. William Walsh discovered Beethoven was poisoned by lead; the Center also studied plasma and hair samples from certain mass murderers (Charles Manson, the first disgruntled postal employee) and found that they were much, much more inundated with toxic metals than the general population. The Center help inner-city youth in a particular school district with nutrient therapy for academics and behavior. Learn about their projects and research at www.hriptc.com.

    In the forefront of advocacy for this approach—through a busy website, www.alternativementalhealth.com, with helpful articles about ending psychiatric drugging, plus a comprehensive directory of doctors and other alternative practitioners who assist—is Safe Harbor International. They hold conferences, sponsor support groups, and listserves where persons like you and me can share information about nutrients that work for them.

More pills?

Some of us are skeptical, though. It sounds like biopsychiatry’s old song and dance: “biochemical imbalance.”  It can even look the same—as in the case of vitamins/supplements—more pills!  More magic bullets!  More things to ingest!

    Special diets can also be a challenge. Most people have their food issues, body image issues. We struggle with obesity, anorexia, food as addiction, food as reward.  But have we deeply considered food as a toxin?  Forget the common shame-triggers over eating too much or too little, counting carbohydrates or calories.  For sensitive individuals, certain foods create allergies, or intolerances, that can foster psychosis.  Here are the voices of some of our allies in this field:

Most people never suspect that among the most ordinary food they eat every day lurks a potential mood disaster. The items that tend to have this upsetting effect are (I’m sorry) bread, pasta, bagels, and cookies made out of flour ground from the grain wheat and its cousins rye, oats, and barley…These unhappy grains, whether “whole” or refined, all harbor a peculiar protein called “gluten” (think glue), which can irritate, inflame, and rupture the lining of the digestive tract…depression and manic-depression can result because the nutrients responsible for regulating our moods can’t be absorbed…gluten has been implicated in mental illness since at least 1979… (Julia Ross, The Mood Cure)

Celiac disease [gluten intolerance] is the most common—and one of the most under-diagnosed—hereditary autoimmune conditions in the United States today…celiac disease affects approximately 1 percent of the U.S. population (approximately 1 in every 100 people)—and 97 percent of them are undiagnosed. ( Peter H. R. Green, MD, Celiac Disease: A Hidden Epidemic

Alexander Schauss and co-workers found an apparent relationship between heavy milk drinking and anti-social behavior. When the diets of young criminals were contrasted with those of adolescents from a similar background, it was found that the juvenile delinquents [sic] consumed almost ten times the amount of milk that was drunk by the control group. (Frank A. Oski, MD, Don’t Drink Your Milk! New Frightening Medical Facts About the World’s Most Overrated Nutrient)

    Other beloved friends that can make us feel worse are caffeine and junk food. In the journal Recovery and Re-emergence Jamie Alexander notes that caffeine

is so toxic that the accumulation of it in the soil around plants that produce it (through discarded leaves and berries decomposing) can kill the producing plants. (“Function and Dysfunction in a Drug-Dependent Society”, Journal No. 5)

Many feel that it’s S.A.D.—our Standard American Diet—processed and artificial, that triggers many of our problem thoughts and behaviors that neither Pharma’s drugs nor other alternative therapies can reach.

Personally speaking

    My own psychiatric incarceration was teenage-Sixties’ style. I ran away from home, lived for getting high, slept with my boyfriend and panhandled in the park.  My parents pronounced it madness; the hospital said “paranoid schizophrenia.”  Back then, the terms substance abuse and anorexia did not exist.  So I was forcibly drugged and left to wonder why their drugs were better than mine.

    Six months later I decided to play the game and went back home, continued getting my juvenile jollies more covertly, and soon was on my own.  I discovered anti-psychiatry, Madness Network News, radical politics, feminism, R.D. Laing and John Weir Perry.  My take on madness vacillated between dismissing it as a sexist plot, or exalting it as visionary experience.  

    Through the following decades of struggling with debilitating migraines and the anxiety-depression cycle, I discovered a spirituality based on the Earth.  Nature healed me a great deal, but I remained plagued by symptoms that, for some reason didn’t respond to imagery, meditation, therapy, and the land.

Listening to autism

    At midlife I started paying attention to the ticking of my biological clock. After marrying someone equally intent on raising a child, infertility and miscarriage were our sad lot until the adoption of a gorgeous infant girl.  We reveled in parenting until her second year of life, when her quirks became unmistakable deficits in speech, sociability, and cognitive skills. At age 2 and ½ years old, she was diagnosed with autism.

    Our experience with treatments taught me that the mental health recovery movement has much to learn from the autism saga.  We have so much in common already.  We are all diagnosed from the psychiatric Inquisition’s bible, the DSM-IV—until the 1960’s, autism was called “childhood schizophrenia.”  And if we examine certain facets of the autism community, we see a resource for inspiration and solidarity.

    First, parents are fierce advocates and activists.  We have to be: the professionals tell us there is no hope, no cure, no viable treatment, and until recently recommended institutions for life.  Second, we come together in massive networks to exchange information and support research toward recovery. Our heroes don’t cling to the medical model.  And third, there is a tacit disavowal of pharmaceuticals:  our kids are enough in their own worlds, we don’t need drugs to dampen and zombie them further. 

    But where the most learning can come from the autism saga is in the wide openness to alternatives.  Anything to help a child—it’s a truism that often we put the suffering of others, especially innocents, ahead of self-care.  Parents who might never be open to the “parallel universe” of alternative medicine had nowhere else to go.  They found a world where new concepts like food allergies, gastrointestinal yeast, toxic metals, and stealth viruses mandated an overthrow of acquiescence to medical authorities.  While more conventional means might be used in tandem with natural medicine, the overall quest is for what works.

    Big Pharma and its lackeys insist on sleuthing out the elusive genetic marker as the cause of autism: a rationale, if they “find” it—to synthesize and patent a new drug for our kids.  Sound familiar? Let us fully understand what differentiates the medical model from the Nutrient Path.  Nutrient use prefers the model of environmental medicine—what in the environment, not your messed-up genetic self, ails you?  And what is a nourishing treatment that goes to one important root of the problem?

We learn from the autism saga that epidemics are not genetic, that possibly the mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, and live viruses in childhood vaccines may be responsible for the epidemic.  But probably not by themselves. Tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals are proliferated without their effects ever having been studied.  It’s the synergy of toxins that might make things terribly worse than just one culprit.  And some see autism as the far end of a spectrum that includes, working back toward lesser symptoms, Asperger’s Syndrome, ADHD, learning disabilities.  It’s been suggested schizophrenia is parallel toxic load, the only difference being that it “strikes” later in life. With one in six children worldwide tagged with a “developmental disability—“ and in the United Kingdom, autism statistics pushing one in fifty children, we must ask:  where are we headed as a species?

As George Bush’s mental health screening looms, you can be sure that his take on “biochemical imbalance” shares nothing with the viewpoint above. On the horizon sits more social control and suppression, and we are called to resist Pharma’s trawling for ever younger consumers.  But we err if we throw the baby out with the bathwater. What if our toxic kids, our “mentally ill,” our violent offenders are the canaries in the mines, warning us about the fate of the Earth? It’s equally detrimental to disguise (and profit from) the epidemic with pharmaceuticals as it is to spin rhetoric about its non-existence and embrace a talking cure exclusively.  Children are suffering, designer drugs speak to the spread of “mental” disorders, and violence is on the rise.  Peer support and soulful talk therapy are options, but for best results should be accompanied by concrete steps with nutrients, detox, and diet.  

Connections

    When I tried my daughter’s diet on myself (gluten and dairy free), kicked caffeine and adapted her supplement regimen to my needs, astounding things happened to my body and mind.  The migraines stopped, crushing fatigue lifted, painful joints eased and I dropped thirty pounds.  Equally profound was the end, within a space of a week or two, of negative thought patterns and paranoid ideations I’d struggled with for decades.  I was delighted to welcome some interesting new foreigners into my mind: clarity and optimism.  I had a lot of catch-up to do with relationships, but gained ground since I no longer grappled with brain fog, memory loss, self-hating voices and the bone-tired obsession with getting a nap.

    The connection, then, was easy to make. If such protocols could work so well for my daughter—talking ever more, making eye contact, running down the driveway, finally interested in toys and other kids—and they greatly improved my mental and physical health…perhaps because she and I are not genetically related, I wondered:  is there a wider application here than “just” autism?  Could all mental illness have a physiological root—not the only root, but a significant and overlooked one? 

Of course the drug companies have their version of this. But perhaps we need to stop flinching when we hear the words, “biochemical imbalance,” sold out as we have been to the idea of a Prozac- or Zyprexa deficiency. We might instead look into the idea of a nutrient imbalance: underlying, environmentally-caused stresses on the bodymind, affecting organs from thyroid to intestine.  And we might ask—just as parents and researchers are determined to defeat autism, with many recovered kids to show for the effort—could we abolish mental illness by integrating the body’s message?

Nourishing counsel

    But it will take more than vitamins and detox to heal the suffering heart and soul.  A key component of an ethic based on nourishment, rather than body-as-machine, is access to counsel that values our (non-hierarchical) interconnectedness.  Re-evaluation Counseling is a long-standing, thriving approach to relationship as healing.  When I participated in these sessions, the freedom from judgment and face-to-face sharing with another human being not presumed more “together,” was exhilarating. It was another step toward holistic healing, healing with staying power, healing at the roots.

    Grief, trauma, and abuse can hardly be prevented by taking your supplements.  Going gluten-free is no substitute for meaningful work. Nutrients may ease or steady one’s reactions to heartbreak, or boost confidence for quests undertaken.  But sorrow, even depression, can be powerful teachers.  Nutrients are not happy pills meant to take the place of inner work. The question is: does our therapeia (Greek for “work of the gods”) really help us grow and move on, or keep us trapped in a loop with the need to keep discharging the same old distress ad infinitum? 

    Julia Ross, in The Mood Cure, talks about “false moods.” It’s the chronic, regular- basis, I don’t know what got into me, or I can’t get over it, quagmires that differ from what she calls “true emotions,” which can include negative feelings. While she allows that neuroscience and the interplay of mood transmitters have clues to recovery, she warns that the drug companies play with these concepts to “create products that can give our emotional equipment a quick charge.  But that’s not the same thing as a real repair job…the repair tools we need for this crucial effort are shockingly simple. They’re specific foods and nutrient supplements that are so exactly what the brain needs that they can begin to correct emotional malfunctions in just twenty-four hours.”  I might add that elsewhere Ross is more holistic when she says the brain works “in concert with some surprisingly brainlike areas of your heart and gut.”

Probing the sources of our distaste

    It was curious that at the Creative Revolution conference there were no workshops on specific nutrient possibilities to propel recovery, nor their power in releasing the hold of psychiatric drugs.  There appears to be a reticence beyond the ingesting of pills. No doubt a valid resistance to authority, and it’s true that decades of scientific work on nutrients were done by mental health professionals—but at what cost to these renegades’ careers?

And yes, it is important to stand up to Pharma’s blather about the mechanical brain by carrying the banner of the heart.  But if we are truly holistic—and accept that the only route to lasting and real relationships with others is self-love--we must deepen a loving relationship with our bodies. Why the resistance?

In my opinion, we often share with Pharma an inflated view of the mind. The high and mighty head is supposed to will our selves off drugs, without stooping to notice that beast from the neck downwards.  There are centuries of dualism and fire-and- brimstone thinking about the sins of the body behind all of this.  However, our culture has lately shown much interest in the ideas of the New Physics which say that matter and energy dance, weave, meld and leave their indelible marks on each other. Some have even suggested our bodies are the microcosm of the world.  But if we battle with Pharma over the exalted brain, it’s much simpler:  good mind-guys vs. bad mind-guys.

There is another culprit: the medical model. “Imbalance” has come to mean we are “sick.”  Only as the Earth is sick, from all the poisons we’ve made her ingest—I suggest that as part of Earth’s body we reflect dis-ease that may be expressed “mentally.”  Who would disagree that the Earth is out of balance in our time? If we see ourselves disconnected from all else, it fosters a kind of macho, rugged-individualism about toughing it out. The root attitude: upholding the separation between body and mind, a grim, no-pain no-gain determination, and the drive to appear invincible if not perfect.

And there are those who see madness as a gift, a potential mystical experience. What bothers me is the romanticizing of madness as the flipside of genius, as if we’re afraid to let go of one for fear of the other’s demise. The names are legion—poets, authors, artists, celebrities—who battled depression and more, often creating great works in and out and around their illness. We might hesitate to give up madness because it holds the possibility of genius. Yet there are many cultures where persons create meaningful art without twisted despair—harder to find as Western industrialism pokes its tentacles into every corner of the globe. 

Healing spirit on the Nutrient Path

    As MindFreedom gathered in Connecticut to network about alternatives, a patchwork of spiritual preferences emerged among participants.  The practicing Catholic hobnobbed with the chanting Buddhist; a speaker-in-tongues sat with an Earthspiritual priestess.  Many other paths were represented among a greater number who were more private, or unconcerned, about the topic.  But because in our culture we are in the throes of a creative re-definition of spirituality, we know it as a different experience than organized religion. Most of us also sense, whether we have a practice or not, that the spiritual quest can be a valuable aid on the journey for “mental” wellness.

    Replacing the medical model with an ethic of nurture prods us to ask:  what are some nutrients for the spirit?

    Openness is key:  techniques that can easily combine with more traditional religious practice, or stand on their own for those disenchanted with church or synagogue. Practices open to all because simple, positive, universal values apply. I’ll profile three options—not as endorsements, just examples among many possibilities.

    Mindfulness meditation. With its origins in Buddhism, this practice hearkens from many schools of thought but now fits the needs of Westerners.  Incidentally, Buddhism as a religion is not “theistic”—that is, it doesn’t concern itself with divinity, but sees that as a private matter or the province of older, indigenous, native religion in countries of origin.  Buddha said simply he didn’t know about God.  The Dalia Lama, noted Tibetan leader states, “My religion is kindness.”  Meditators say their practice can de-stress the body, provide food for thought, and open a channel to the godhead of choice. Most practices are based on the values of harmlessness, lovingkindness, and release of clinging/disempowering attachments to persons and things.

    Earth-based spirituality. Shamanism, native ritual (not as exploited by whites), neo-paganism, women’s spirituality and the Western magical tradition all honor, teach and learn from the lessons of air, fire, water, and earth.  As with Buddhism, structured schools are out there but the movement mostly values creative, self-made, nature spirituality to suit.  Often a central image is the “Divine Mother,” our Earth as the womb of all life, our sacred home. Hence women are prominent in leadership positions when such groups form.  There also is a valuing of gay persons as those who walk between the worlds of gender, privy to a unique mystical wisdom. The only requisite tool of an Earth-based spirituality is access to the great outdoors.

    Energy work. A healing modality on the surface, sessions in Reiki, aura cleaning, chakra re-balancing and the like often end up as a communion between individuals via a “third force” invited and allowed. Whether using names for the divine or simply sharing energy that promotes The Good, energy healing is hands-on immersion in subtle fields of being that some say feel like touching pure spirit.  As with peer counseling methods, in a good energy session the blurring between healer and client makes for a shared relationship of something ineffable. The healing power of human relationship is amplified by a felt interconnectedness to the all-that-is.

Gathering the Triad:  The Nutrient Path

    Mary Maddock of MindFreedom Ireland spoke of her recovery this way, in a panel entitled How We Heal: Diverse Tools for Recovery.  “I discovered my body,” she said. “It was the touch…and the breath…” Mary exercises in water up to two hours per day, gently to strenuously.  She told us of the benefits for mental wellness:  having a goal, getting out in the world, and forming relationships with others immersed in the touch of the water.

    Shery Mead, on the same panel, inspired us with the implications of relationship, putting the power of what we can do for each other into a wide perspective, “using relationships to decrease the violence in our culture.”  Shery is the founder of Intentional Peer Support, and challenged us to think about recovery as a political movement: not just healing for individuals. Approached with a commitment to empathy and “affiliation,” we grasp “relationship as social action…a deep, holistic [emphasis mine] understanding based on mutual experience,” creating “a culture of wellness, a culture of health,” by rousting out “the illness narrative, the illness dialogue.”  We are thinking holistically when we envision our recovery accomplishing, as another MindFreedom leader, Janet Foner, stated, “the withering away of the mental health system.”   

    If we broaden relationship to include body, mind, and spirit, we might find that recovery is less about building bridges between these perceived-as-separate countries within the self. Metaphor is everything: to build a bridge implies disconnection, a need to reach across the void.  Is a human being, well or otherwise, so neatly ordered into separate compartments of mind, body, and that hard-to-define force—higher values, or spirit as you define it?  That worldview of separation was handed down by vested interests who reaped power or profits accordingly. It may be that the epitome of mental wellness is to re-cover that territory, not by constructing bridges, but through the realization that already and at once, united you stand.