How Come They're Happy and I'm Not? (19 page)
Read How Come They're Happy and I'm Not? Online
Authors: Peter Bongiorno
As is true for many forms of natural medicines, different sources recommend various methods of dosing. I usually recommend patients take one dose per day of a higher potency such as 200C,
and give two weeks for a response. If you notice an improvement, continue at the same dosage and let the remedy work. If there's no improvement, you can change the dosage or remedy. With homeopathy, listen to your body—and try to assess if you are feeling better. If you think some of your symptoms have gotten worse. it may be best to try another remedy. If you are not sure how to best approach it yourself, consult your homeopath or a practitioner who is knowledgeable of homeopathic medications.
Hydrotherapy may be defined as the use of water, in any of its forms, for the maintenance of health or the treatment of disease. It has been employed since ancient times as a way to balance the body and mind. According to Hippocrates, water therapy “allays lassitude.”
Have you ever taken a cold swim? How does it make you feel? After you get over the initial shock of the cold, it's usually very invigorating. This is because when you go to a cold temperature quickly, your blood moves from the surface of your body to the core, and this helps bathe your brain and organs in fresh blood while also cleaning out your system.
Throughout evolution, primates have endured physiological stressors like swimming through a cold river or hunting in very hot weather. Naturopathic hydrotherapies are designed to take advantage of the natural body reaction to these stressors. It has been theorized that brief changes in body temperature are important for proper brain function. As I have seen it help other people with low mood, hydrotherapy may help you return some of the good old-fashioned physical “stressors” that are missing in modern life.
One group of researchers in Virginia suggests that hydrotherapy may be useful to treat cancer and chronic fatigue as well as depression. Cold exposure therapies may actually be the best choice for depressed patients. The simultaneous firing of all skin-based cold receptors—thought to be three to ten times denser than
warm receptors—from jumping into the cold may result in a positive therapeutic effect. It has also been shown that lowering brain temperature protects neurons and decreases inflammation. In addition, exposure to cold has been shown to activate the sympathetic nervous system, increase the blood level as well as brain release of norepinephrine, and elevate production of beta-endorphin, a feelgood molecule that gives a sense of well-being.
Cold water exposure may have a mechanism similar to another proven antidepressant treatment: electric shock therapy. Electric shock therapy has long been used to treat drug-resistant forms of depression with a procedure called electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). These effects may well help depressed patients, especially those who do well with increased release of norepinephrine as with duloxetine (Cymbalta) or other serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs).
I recommend patients with depression use a brief whole-body exposure to cold water in the form of a cold shower. Start the shower at a comfortable warm temperature and slowly cool the water over a five-minute period down to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and stay at that temperature for two to three minutes. You can use a thermometer to check the temperature as you go. This can be performed once or twice a day for a duration of a couple weeks to several months.
Although mild cold stress seems to help the brain work better, animal research has shown that extreme cold may actually worsen mood. To avoid this, follow the directions I've detailed here.
CLINICAL CASE: LEN'S RETURN TO THE WATER
Len is a thirty-seven-year-old film music production technician who came to my office with a diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome and anxiety. His digestive system had started going awry about a year earlier, and he had to run to the bathroom because of gas and diarrhea a few times a day. After a colonoscopy
and a few visits, Len's gastroenterologist recommended he start Imodium to stop the diarrhea and antidepressants to suppress both his anxiety and the nervous function of the intestines.
I asked Len what had been going on in his life when this started. He had recently taken a “real job” in music production, for his own music writing career was not paying the bills and his living situation was too expensive. At that point, two things had changed: he stopped his daily morning swims at the YMCA, and he ate mostly Chinese takeout while slumped over a sound board. As a plan of action, I asked Len to change his takeout food to something more healthy: he found a macrobiotic vegetarian place and a sushi restaurant nearby that delivered. The food change helped about 60 percent after two weeks.
At that point, I asked Len to get back to his exercise routine, which he said he had no time for right then, for the production schedule had him at work early and leaving late. Because exercise was not an option, I asked Len to try contrast hydrotherapy over his abdomen in the shower. I had him first place a few drops of lavender essential oil on the shower floor, so he could smell it as the shower heated. Then he simply turned the water up to a hot (but not scalding) temperature and let it rain on his stomach and intestine area for two minutes. Then he quickly switched it to cold for forty-five seconds. I asked him to repeat this cycle three times. Len wrote to me that “although it seemed time-consuming, it had a wonderful calming effect” on both his mind and his stomach. Within the next week, his bowel symptoms disappeared. Len and I also discussed a plan to move him back into the music writing world and leave his job, which he realized was the catalyst for his original stress.
In this chapter, we've discussed a multitude of supplements and some good old-fashioned water therapy. While all of these are not necessary for all people with depression, my hope is that this information and these patient stories will help you recognize which situations might be most similar to your own so you can pick the best ones to help you feel better.
Bringing in the New
The first duty of love is to listen
.
—P
AUL
T
ILLICH
My experience working with patients over the years has taught me one thing: no two people are alike, and no two effective treatment plans are alike. As such, it's the priority of a physician like me to first listen and then talk with each patient to figure out together which combination of lifestyle changes, remedies, and therapies may suit the patient the best. It's clear that if you are reading this book, you have a love for yourself . . . and you want to get better. So I encourage you to listen to your heart and spirit as you read the descriptions of these therapies to see which ones speak to you.
In that spirit, this chapter corrals the many different modalities and healing therapies I would like you to consider as you traverse this journey toward healing. New thoughts and experiences will help change your brain and make it new.
Some of these therapies I learned about from my patients. In truth, everything I have learned about medicine and healing, I have learned from my patients—so when a patient tells me something has helped him, I listen very closely in the hope of learning about it myself. This way, I can offer another tool to help future patients. And as a patient, you can look for practitioners like this (see the resources at the end of this book for help with this) and build your
own dream team of healers and therapies that you can rely on for support when needed.
The modalities listed in this chapter are very different from each other, in honor of how each of you reading this is very different. The one thing they all have in common is their ability to help depression sufferers, as they continue the journey to understand depression and come to terms with it in a manner that allows them to become closer to the potential of who they really are.
Read through this chapter at your leisure—try to see which modalities speak to you and make sense in your heart. These are the ones you may want to try first.
The French have a term,
raison d'être
, which translates as “reason to live.” The psychologist Rollo May defined depression as “the inability to construct a future.” In cases of depression, there's at some level a lack of perceived reason to live. In the less severe cases, depression sufferers may not enjoy their jobs or relationships and feel blue sometimes. At the most severe level, people truly believe there's no reason to continue on because nothing can get better. If you are reading this book, you are somewhere in that continuum:
Sometimes Feeling Blue → Depressed → No Reason to Live
There's a theory in the psychology world called the analytical rumination hypothesis. The basic idea here is that your body's depression reaction is a response to help work things out: the body actually makes you move away from perceived danger, withdrawing for protection while it tries to figure out how to change the situation. Two key questions in my mind while working with patients with depression are: What is the depressed body saying to the patients? Can they learn from this?
In his book
Manufacturing Depression
, psychologist Gary Greenberg discusses the idea that “mental illnesses weren't real, but merely ways of pathologizing non-conformity.” While mental illness is indeed real, for many people have been depressed, one could argue that depression has helped some create a better life, that depression has been a reaction to living a life not congruent with what society wanted or expected. When I was in my twenties, I was in a rock band. I remember feeling conflicted and quite blue thinking about what my family, society, and friends with “real jobs” thought of me. Did they wonder why I was not a doctor or professional? Though I wasn't clinically depressed, the pressure that came along with bucking societal convention was definitely strong.
Many well-known, amazing contributors to society have battled depression: musicians Sting and John Denver, baseball great Ty Cobb, quarterback Terry Bradshaw, early twentieth-century leaders Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin was also depressed. He felt completely held back and debilitated by his mood swings and symptoms. In reference to his low mood, fits of crying, palpitations, and digestive problems, he is quoted as saying: “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science.” An article about the analytical ruminative hypothesis in the
New York Times
explained an interpretation of Darwin's experience: “Instead, the pain (and depression) may actually have accelerated the pace of his research, allowing him to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work.”
The positive impact that Darwin and many, many other people who suffer and have suffered depression have had on our lives is great. Looking at their stories, one could argue that if not for their experience of depression, their lives might not have been so extraordinary. A patient I worked with who was in the midst of a miserable divorce told me, in retrospect, that her pain and depression was the way to get away from the world—“to a place where I could think, plan, and reinvent the person I really wanted to be.”
I will tell you that some psychologists and psychiatrists believe the analytical rumination hypothesis is garbage at best, deadly at worst. Deadly, for they are reasonably worried that caregivers who believe depression is only a helpful learning tool may not take it seriously enough to recognize when severely depressed patients need to be treated more urgently. They may be correct, for some people with severe depression might get away from the world to hurt themselves instead of focusing on how to make their situation better. This is where we need to consider all aspects of treatment—natural (foods, lifestyle, herbs, and so on) and conventional (drugs and hospitalization). Safety should be the first priority, and all treatments have their place.
However, I do believe that like its more energetic cousin anxiety, depression is a method for the body to protect itself—and it gives us clues on how to heal in the process. Anxiety increases the stress response (called the sympathetic response) to create an excitable state strong enough to make us get away from danger or perform a feat of survival. Depression also has an increased stress response but instead attempts to get us to crawl back into our shell when danger is sensed.
A patient I recently worked with told me that when his brain was depressed, “it was like a car that would not start. It made me sit parked and think about what was going on in my life until I figured out what to do.” This reaction has been described by many of my patients, and can be quite healthy, for it gives a chance to process and make decisions in a space of safety and out of the way of oncoming traffic.
For some depressed patients, and possibly you, these feelings become out of balance, and that space of safety becomes a prison which cannot be easily exited. That means you need more support—which is why this book can be useful. In some cases, these feelings go way too far, to the point where the feelings become a physical danger to the depression sufferer or to someone close to that person. Again, at that point safety may call for medication, psychiatric care, or even a stay in a hospital. once the danger has
passed, then natural means may be the best next step to truly heal the physical, emotional, and spiritual realms.
In my clinical experience, I have found what I call positivity work to be an important approach in changing the patterns and messages in patients' brains in order to move them back toward the left of the depression continuum. Hopefully, they move back so far that they are feeling good. This positivity work includes two aspects: replacing old thoughts and picking one new thing to do.
In any form of depression, one restraint that holds people back from being happy lies in the ability of the brain to replay old negative messages over and over. Some of these messages can be