A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives

Copyright

This book contains advice and information relating to health care. It is not intended to replace medical advice and should be used to supplement rather than replace regular care by your doctor. It is recommended that you seek medical advice before embarking on any medical programme or treatment. All efforts have been made to assure the accuracy of the information contained in this book as of the date of publication. The publisher and the author disclaim liability for any medical outcomes that may occur as a result of applying the methods suggested in this book.

Thorsons

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First published in the US by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers This UK edition published by Thorsons 2016

FIRST EDITION

© Kelly Brogan 2016

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016 Cover photograph © Jonathon Kambouris/Gallery Stock

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Kelly Brogan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN 9780008128005

Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780008128012

Version: 2016-02-22

To the legacy of Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez

and to all of the light workers

who illuminate the path for my daughters,

and everyone’s daughters.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: Psych—­It’s Not All in Your Head

PART I: THE TRUTH ABOUT DEPRESSION

1 Decoding Depression

It’s Not a Disease: What You Don’t Know About This Syndrome and How It Manifests

2 Truth Serum: Coming Clean About the Serotonin Myth

How You’ve Been Misled, Misdiagnosed, and Mistreated

3 The New Biology of Depression

What Gut Microbes and Silent Inflammation Have to Do with Mental Health

4 The Great Psychiatric Pretenders

Two Common, Resolvable Conditions That Can Lead to a Psychiatric Diagnosis

5 Why Body Lotions, Tap Water, and OTC Pain Relievers Should Come with New Warning Labels

Common Exposures and Drugs That Can Lead to Depression

PART 2: NATURAL TREATMENTS FOR WHOLE-BODY WELLNESS

6 Let Food Be Thy Medicine

Nutritional Recommendations to Heal Your Body and Free Your Mind (Without Feeling Like You’re on an Impossible Diet)

7 The Power of Meditation, Sleep, and Exercise

Three Simple Lifestyle Habits That Can Enhance Mental Health

8 Clean House

How to Detoxify Your Environment

9 Testing and Supplementing

Supporting the Healing Process

10 4 Weeks to a Natural High

A 30-Day Plan of Action

Closing Words: Own Your Body and Free Your Mind

Recipes

Notes

List of Searchable Terms

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Psych—­It’s Not All in Your Head

All along the history of medicine, the really great physicians were peculiarly free from the bondage of drugs.

—­Sir William Osler (1849–1919)

If you’ve picked up this book, then chances are you can relate to any of the following: persistent distress, malaise, anxiety, inner agitation, fatigue, low libido, poor memory, irritability, insomnia, sense of hopelessness, and feeling overwhelmed and trapped but emotionally flat. You might wake up most mornings unmotivated and uninspired, and you drag yourself around all day waiting for it to end (or waiting for a drink). Maybe you feel a sense of dread or panic without knowing why. You can’t silence the negative thoughts, which puts you on edge. Sometimes it seems like you could let loose an endless stream of tears, or perhaps you can’t remember the last time you cared enough about something to cry. All of these descriptions are symptoms that typically fall under a diagnosis of clinical depression. And if you were to seek help through conventional medicine, even if you don’t consider yourself “depressed,” you’d likely be handed a prescription for an antidepressant, joining the more than 30 million users in America. You might already be part of this community and feel like your fate is now sealed.

It doesn’t have to be.

Over the past twenty-five years, ever since the FDA approval of Prozac-type medications, we’ve been taught that drugs can improve the symptoms of or even cure mental illness, particularly depression and anxiety disorders. Today they are among the most prescribed, best-selling drugs.1 This has led to one of the most silent and underestimated tragedies in the history of modern health care.

I am a practicing psychiatrist with a degree in cognitive neuroscience from MIT, an MD from Weill Cornell Medical College, and clinical training from NYU School of Medicine, and I care deeply for women struggling with their well-being. I’m compelled to share what I’ve learned from witnessing the corruption of modern psychiatry and its sordid history while investigating holistic methods that focus on nutrition, meditation, and physical activity—­what some practitioners are calling lifestyle medicine because the approach involves changes in everyday lifestyle habits, not the use of pharmaceuticals. While such drug-free methods are entirely evidence-based, they are virtually unknown in this age of the quick fix.

Let’s get a few facts straight from the get-go. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m not even that politically minded, but I do like to think for myself. I’m a natural skeptic and pragmatist. These days, there are a ­couple of issues in my line of work that are making my blood boil, and I’m working to connect the dots between them to help establish a framework for a truth in science “sniff-test.” For one, symptoms of mental illness are not entirely a psychological problem, nor are they purely a neurochemical issue (and, as we’ll see shortly, not a single study has proven that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain). Depression is merely a symptom, a sign that something is off balance or ill in the body that needs to be remedied.

And two, depression is a grossly misdiagnosed and mistreated condition today, especially among women—­one in seven of whom is being medicated. (For reasons we’ll be exploring, women experience more than twice the rate of depression as men, regardless of race or ethnic background. One in four women in their forties and fifties use psychiatric drugs.)2 Although I was trained to think that antidepressants are to the depressed (and to the anxious, panicked, OCD, IBS, PTSD, bulimic, anorexic, and so on) what eyeglasses are to the poor-sighted, I no longer buy into this bill of goods. And after reading this book, you too may think twice about all you thought you understood about the causes of depression.

We owe most of our mental illnesses—­including their kissing cousins such as chronic worry, fogginess, and crankiness—­to lifestyle factors and undiagnosed physiological conditions that develop in places far from the brain, such as the gut and thyroid. That’s right: you might owe your gloominess and unremitting unease to an imbalance that is only indirectly related to your brain’s internal chemistry. Indeed, what you eat for breakfast (think whole wheat toast, fresh OJ, milk, and multigrain cereal) and how you deal with that high cholesterol and afternoon headache (think Lipitor and Advil) could have everything to do with the causes and symptoms of your depression. And if you think a chemical pill can save, cure, or “correct” you, you’re dead wrong. That is about as misguided as taking aspirin for a nail stuck in your foot.

While it’s well documented that multiple forces—­such as a tragic life event or the fallout from hormonal shifts—­can trigger symptoms labeled (and treated) as depression, no one has explained the potential for antidepressants to irreversibly disable the body’s natural healing mechanisms. Despite what you’ve been led to believe, antidepressants have repeatedly been shown in long-term scientific studies to worsen the course of mental illness—­to say nothing of the risks of liver damage, abnormal bleeding, weight gain, sexual dysfunction, and reduced cognitive function that they entail. The dirtiest little secret of all is the fact that antidepressants are among the most difficult drugs to taper from, more so than alcohol and opiates. While you might call it “going through withdrawal,” we medical professionals have been instructed by Big Pharma to call it “discontinuation syndrome,” which is characterized by fiercely debilitating physical and psychological reactions.

So unlike most psychiatrists, I’m not one to diagnose a “permanent” condition, write a prescription, and send my patient on her merry way—­the knee-jerk gold standard in my field today. Nor do I have her sit on a couch and talk about her problems endlessly. Much to the contrary, my first item of business is to discuss her medical and personal history, including questions that give me a sense of her life’s exposures since birth, from noxious chemical encounters to whether or not she was born through the birth canal and breast-fed. I also order lab tests that help me take in the bigger picture of her total biology; these are noninvasive screenings that most psychiatrists and general practitioners don’t even think about doing (and in this book you’ll be learning about these easy-to-obtain tests as tools to help you personalize your path to healing).

While I acknowledge my patient’s past experiences, I also focus on what’s unfolding today from a cellular standpoint and the potential impairment (“dysregulation”) of her immune system. The medical literature has emphasized the role of inflammation in mental illness for more than twenty years. I listen closely and ask her about her current lifestyle, a dismissed and neglected variable in conventional medicine. I reflect on her entirety, considering factors like how much sugar she consumes and other dietary habits, how well her gut and its microbial communities are collaborating, hormone levels such as thyroid and cortisol, genetic variants in her DNA that can put her at a higher risk for symptoms of depression, her beliefs about health, and her intentions for our work together. (And, yes, this takes hours.)

All of my patients share similar goals: they want to feel physically vibrant and emotionally balanced, which I believe is everyone’s birthright—­not perpetually drained, unsettled, mentally foggy, and unable to enjoy life. Under my guidance, they achieve these goals through very simple and straightforward strategies: dietary modifications (more healthy fats and less sugar, dairy, and gluten); natural supplements like B vitamins and probiotics that don’t require a prescription and can even be delivered through certain foods; minimizing exposures to biology-disrupting toxicants* like fluoride in tap water and fragrances in cosmetics; harnessing the power of sufficient sleep and physical movement; and practicing behavioral techniques aimed at promoting the relaxation response. These basic lifestyle interventions facilitate the body’s powerful self-healing mechanisms, and there’s plenty of science to support these protocols. This isn’t New Age medicine; I will prove my claims and back my recommendations with current peer-reviewed studies from the world’s most esteemed publications.

I do not deny that I have developed a sometimes belligerent relationship with much of conventional medicine over the past several years. After having witnessed the devastation this paradigm has wrought upon the lives of hundreds of my patients, I’m convinced that the pharmaceutical industry and its bedfellows, concealed behind official titles such as certain medical societies and associations, have created an illusion of science where none exists, in the ser­vice of profit over professional responsibility. I will myth bust just about everything you think you know about the role of drugs in the treatment of depression and anxiety. It’s time to turn the lights on in this dark room. Let’s open up this conversation and embrace a perspective on depression that radically challenges mainstream assumptions and theories. If I do my job well, you’ll never look at another ad for an antidepressant again in quite the same way.

Admittedly, I haven’t always been militant about my now unshakable, passionate belief in the effectiveness of holistic, drug-free medicine to heal women’s minds, moods, and memory. I’ve crossed over from the other side in many ways, having once been a dyed-in-the-wool allopathic doctor. I’m from a family that regards conventional medicine as a guiding light. I was always interested in neuroscience and the promise of understanding behavior and pathology, and I pursued psychiatry for that reason. My inner feminist wasn’t totally satisfied, however, until I began to specialize in women’s health. There’s a growing field in psychiatry called perinatal or reproductive psychiatry that focuses on the risk-benefit analysis of treating women during their reproductive years. This is a uniquely vulnerable time period, particularly if a woman is contemplating taking drugs while simultaneously planning a pregnancy or is already pregnant. I soon began to feel constrained by the medication and/or talk therapy model of treating depression, and I delved into how to cultivate better options for not just women in their reproductive years but all women across the entire life cycle.

The further I stepped away from traditional psychiatry, the more I started to ask questions few others in my field were raising, principally “Why?” Why have the body and mind become dysfunctional in so many millions of women? Are we inherently broken? Why have we gotten so much sicker in the past century when our DNA—­the same DNA we’ve had for millions of years—­hasn’t changed? Or are doctors just getting better at labeling symptoms under the wastebasket diagnosis that is depression?

These are among the many questions addressed in this book; the answers pave the way to a revolutionary—­and by that I mean extremely self-empowering!—­new approach to well-being.

I’ve seen extraordinary turnarounds in health. Take, for instance, the fifty-six-year-old woman who entered my office complaining of low energy, pervasive pain, dry skin, constipation, weight gain, and forgetfulness. She was taking an antidepressant and a cholesterol-lowering statin but feeling progressively worse and desperate for answers. Within months, she was off all meds, her cholesterol level optimized, and her “depression” vanished. Or consider the thirty-two-year-old woman with a history of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) for which she’d taken birth control pills until trying to become pregnant. When she came in to see me, she was on an antidepressant for her flat mood and fatigue and was unable to conceive despite two years of trying. What followed next was not a miracle but rather something I witness every day in my practice. With a few easy changes to her diet and a combination of other lifestyle strategies—­the same ones outlined in this book—­she was soon prescription-free and pregnant. She also was symptom-free for the first time in her life.

You’ll be meeting many women in this book whose stories speak for themselves and are emblematic of millions of others who live with unnecessary, life-depleting depression. And I trust that you’ll relate to one or more of them. Whether you’re currently taking antidepressants or not, this book has something for every woman who struggles to feel like the radiant self she deserves to be. I see a lot of patients who have “tried everything” and have been to the country’s top doctors. In fact, a good percentage of my practice involves treating other physicians and psychiatrists.

Many women credit me with the initiation of life transformation. Because I believe passionately in the power of lifestyle medicine to produce changes that are greater than the sum of their parts—­bigger, bolder shifts in how we relate to life, spirituality, the environment, and even authorities—­I see myself as an ambassador to a new way of experiencing health and well-being. This way of being may be built on the ashes of suffering, but may be the way to rise up, phoenix-like, emboldened, and stronger than ever. That strength and resilience is yours, and it follows you everywhere you take it.

I’ve divided the book into two parts. Part 1: “The Truth About Depression,” takes you on a tour of your mental health’s friends and enemies, from everyday foods to common prescription and over-the-counter medications. You’ll soon be consuming more saturated fat and cholesterol and shopping differently in the grocery store and drugstore. In compelling detail, backed by science, I’ll expose the stunning relationship between your gut’s health and mental health. And I’ll do so within the context of inflammation, an overused buzzword today that most ­people still don’t truly comprehend, especially when it comes to its critical role in depression. I will prove that depression is often a result of chronic inflammation—­simple as that. I also will explain the underlying responsibilities of your immune system in orchestrating all matters of mental health.

Part 1 includes an overview of the latest research on how we can dramatically alter our genetic destiny—­how our genes express themselves, including those directly related to mood—­through the everyday choices we make in food and activities. The goal of Part 1 is to prep you for the program you’ll embark on in Part 2: “Natural Treatments for Whole-Body Wellness.” This is where I guide you through my program, a program designed both for women not taking medications and those who are and perhaps are dreaming of tapering off. Included is a four-week plan of action, complete with menu plans and strategies for incorporating new lifestyle habits into your day.

For support and ongoing updates, you can go to my website, www.kellybroganmd.com. There you’ll be able to read my blog, watch my instructional videos, access the latest scientific studies, and download materials that will help you tailor the information in this book to your personal preferences.

Once you apply to your life what you learn in these pages, you will reap more than the reward of mental stability. My patients often list the following “side benefits” to my program: feeling in control of their lives and bodies (including effortless weight management); clarity of mind and spirit; enhanced energy; and an unwavering tolerance for distress. Who wouldn’t want these results? The time has come for you to have a mind of your own.

Let’s get started.

* A toxicant refers to any toxic substance, though it’s often a term used to indicate substances made by humans or introduced into the environment by human activity. The term toxin, on the other hand, refers to toxicants produced naturally by a living organism.

PART ONE

THE TRUTH ABOUT DEPRESSION

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