Depression/Anxiety: Are you addressing the cause?
Mental health has become a huge topic of conversation in the last few years. Whether its setting boundaries, taking time off to prevent burn out, or not being ashamed to seek help. One conversation that is not really being had in the mainstream discussion is addressing possible physical barriers to recovery from mental disorders such as depression and anxiety. While I’m delighted to see mental health start to be taken as seriously as physical health, little attention is being paid to looking for root causes. Time after time I see clients come in for help because the conventional model tells them to take medication and see a therapist. Not to say that those things are not helpful and sometimes absolutely necessary, but no one looked for possible imbalances contributing to their mental health crisis.
For example, a young woman comes in looking for help finding the root cause of her anxiety. She describes feeling on edge constantly and any one stress can push her overboard. She’s not always felt this way and thinks something must be wrong. She had expressed in her visit that she had a very low stress job and was in a great place in her life so she can’t figure out why she would feel so stressed. Sure enough, we run her lab work and she has a seriously high cortisol. Not just a little stressed high, but significantly high. This alone could be causing her to feel on edge constantly as cortisol is one of our hormones that raises when we think we are in danger. Basically, her body was telling her that she was in danger constantly even though she wasn’t, which very much corelates with how she was feeling.
Another woman comes in saying that she feels depressed with fatigue and no motivation. Her primary care doctor ran her basic screening exam and told her everything was normal. She can’t shake the feeling that its her thyroid even though she was told it was normal. She comes to me for a second opinion. I look at her labs and see that while her thyroid is technically normal, it is not optimal. A low dose thyroid medication and some thyroid support and low and behold, depression improves significantly.
The number of examples I could give you could fill a book. Men with low testosterone, women with high or low estrogen contributing to their mental health disorders. Others with significant gut bacteria imbalances which reduce serotonin production. Genetic mutations in neurotransmitter metabolism pathways that simple vitamins and herbs can support. Yet none of these issues were caught by the conventional medical system because it is not a part of the standard screening labs, and they are not trained to look for a root cause. Their training tells them that if they get rid of the symptoms usually with medication than the patient is “well managed” and so they have done their job. It is not malicious its just the way they think. Naturopathic Doctors are trained to always be looking for the root cause of any symptom. Symptoms are simply the body’s way of telling us that there is something wrong that needs to be addressed. Even many genetic disorders can be improved by reducing the load of faulty enzymes and pathways.
I write all this to say, if you struggle with depression and or anxiety, don’t give up. Don’t let people write you off or let them make you feel like you are crazy to look for actual answers to your questions. The answers are out there and while sometimes we must be ok with never finding those answers, never give up looking.
