It's Not All in Your Mind

Depression-Free, Naturally
by Joan Mathews Larson, Ph.D.

In this groundbreaking book, nutritionist Joan Mathews Larson, Ph.D., founder of Minnesota's esteemed Health Recovery Center, offers her revolutionary formulas for healing your emotions — biochemically. Through proven all-natural formulas, Seven Weeks to Emotional Healing will help you find the emotional well-being you've been missing your entire life. Inside you'll discover how to

• Screen yourself for emotional and behavioral symptoms
• Recognize the mental and physical clues that indicate biochemical imbalances
• Heal your depression and anxiety with the right vitamins and minerals
• Stabilize your mood swings and protect your well-being with essential fatty acids
• Choose the right foods for optimal mental fitness
• Rejuvenate your body with key natural hormones

Safe, fast, more long-lasting and cheaper than prescription drugs or psychotherapy, Seven Weeks to Emotional Healing will help you find balance and well-being.

Chapter 1

As far back as he could remember, Peter had been fearful, but he covered it up extremely well. Now married, he supported his family adequately but felt shy and joyless most of the time. He drank beer occasionally to offset those feelings. Still, he seemed to become more of a loner with each passing year. Peter never considered himself a candidate to see a psychiatrist. He was simply living out his life of quiet despair until we met.

Meg was an excellent attorney with a very bright mind. Her facade was take-charge aggressive, and few crossed her. Yet at our first meeting she was in tears because of her angry, erratic behavior. She had no idea why she seemed to exist in a state of such high arousal. . . . This trait was hurting those she loved the most. She wanted to mellow out but knew her career couldn't afford the fog prescription drugs created.

An exceptional designer, musician, and musical director, Eric didn't have the emotional staying power to ignite his career into high gear. Despite his brilliance, his heart pounded with anxiety during performances. He drank a lot of caffeine and was a heavy smoker. His mood swings left him exhausted when he desperately needed extra energy. Ongoing psychological counseling did not change any of this. . . . Now he was considering taking prescribed drugs to relieve his depression and anxiety. He summed it up the day we met, telling me, at age forty-two, "Some days my life feels entirely hopeless."

Donna usually felt scattered. Her thinking was foggy, and her problems concentrating were affecting her job. Memories of her childhood were of a pale, listless little girl who had never felt the world was a friendly place. She had had frequent childhood illnesses — earaches, strep throats, and colds. Now as an adult, she still felt fragile. She told me she needed help to overcome her muddled thinking and get some joy in her life. But her number-one priority was finding relief from her fatigue, which made her tired right down to her bones. For Donna, life was an uphill battle — and she was slowly losing the war.

It is part of the human condition that we keep taking our own inventory and continually come up short, but it becomes a calamity if the missing pieces prevent us from enjoying a fulfilling, stable life. If, like Peter, Meg, Eric, and Donna, you are saying, "I wish I could feel better, think better, perform better," it is time to stop wishing and take heart! This book will change your life.

Like the case studies just cited, you, too, may be coexisting with an erratic nervous system or brain, and lack the energy, verve, joy, and confidence that are your birthright. Yet you may be hesitant about seeing a therapist. And, in fact, the idea that a good therapist can solve these problems by simply talking to you has been the great bane of the twentieth century! Untold millions are filling the coffers of psychologists and counselors who listen to the tales of misery that such lives produce but aren't able to effect real, positive, lasting changes in their clients.

Fortunately, in the last few decades, biochemists and medical doctors have begun to pinpoint scientific explanations for behavior that used to be labeled "psychological." These researchers have noticed that:

• many "psychological" symptoms often cluster in families.

• certain physical changes in the brain (and body) can create mayhem emotionally.

• an internal invasion of yeast parasites may create full-blown mental and physical illness.

• food intolerances strongly affect our emotions.

• airborne chemicals can alter our brains.

• angry outbursts are predictable from a brain in a chemical state of high arousal all the time.

• dozens of biochemical mistakes can result in bleak depression or anxiety.

All of these are fixable, if we can identify them!

A New Direction

In 1896, Sigmund Freud predicted that "the future may teach us to exercise a direct influence by means of chemical substances upon the amounts of energy and their distribution in the apparatus of the mind." By 1927 he had become "firmly convinced that one day all these mental disturbances we are trying to understand will be treated by means of hormones or similar substances." How right he was! Science now knows it can address such "mental disturbances" biochemically. It is no longer believed that talk therapy and good counseling advice can relieve the agony emanating from a chemically disrupted brain.

In fact, science has now taken off at a gallop in the direction of biochemical repair. One of the leaders in the field is a brilliant Canadian named Abram Hoffer who is both a biochemist and a psychiatrist. In the 1950s, he began to apply pellagra research to psychiatric patients. Earlier, vitamin B3 (niacin) deficiency had been established as the cause of pellagra, a disease that causes confusion, disorientation, and memory disturbance. So here was a classic example of a natural substance that prevents a psychotic state. In fact, the prolonged absence of niacin in our bodies will ultimately result in death!

In 1962, Dr. Hoffer published the first double-blind study in the field of psychiatry. He found that, of ninety-eight schizophrenic patients receiving megadoses of niacin, the hospital readmission rate was 10 percent over three years with no suicides, while the placebo group had a 50 percent readmission with four suicides. Also in the 1960s, Dr. Hoffer treated about twenty-five former prisoners of war who had been imprisoned in Japanese concentration camps during World War II. He found that, in order to be free of the many physical and psychiatric symptoms (i.e., fears, anxieties, insomnia, depression) they developed during their internment, 90 percent of the former prisoners had developed a permanent need for large doses of niacin.

The Canadian Department of Health and Welfare also conducted a study to determine if the general chronic illnesses seen in the men held in Japanese POW camps, who underwent starvation and excessive stress, were present in their brothers who had served in Europe. The differences were remarkable! The men incarcerated by the Japanese suffered from serious ongoing psychiatric and neurological diseases throughout life, as well as heart disease, premature blindness, arthritis, and a high death rate. None of these symptoms was present in their brothers. Clearly, the starvation and stress endured in the Japanese camps had created chronic illness. Fortunately, Dr. Hoffer was able to treat some of these men, extending their lives and saving their sanity with niacin (B3).

Excerpted from Depression-Free, Naturally by Joan Mathews Larson, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of Wellspring/Ballantine, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Dr. Joan Mathews Larson is the author of the national bestseller Seven Weeks to Sobriety. She holds a doctorate in nutrition and is the founder and executive director of the highly esteemed Health Recovery Center in Minneapolis. It was the loss of her seventeen-year-old son to suicide that fueled her search for more effective solutions to emotional healing. Her clinic has now successfully treated several thousand people over a twenty-year period. She lives in Minneapolis.