Balanced Brain Chemicals: Emotional and Mental Health

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

(Page 3 of 5)

The reward of getting the right chemicals into the brain at "optimum concentrations" is a joy to witness. Last year a friend complained to me that his three-year-old autistic son, Seth, refused to welcome him when he came home each evening. Instead, Seth sat there self-involved, shutting out the world. A therapist visited them twice weekly, but progress was poor.

I encouraged him to start Seth on B6 and magnesium, both of which have been shown to work well for autistic children. Within two weeks I received an excited call: Seth was waking up to the world around him and starting to interact much more with his folks. Then, weeks later, his family stopped giving him the supplements, thinking perhaps the therapist was responsible for the breakthrough. It took very little time before Seth's autistic behavior reappeared. His parents ran for his nutrients.

For this child, B6, which prevents the loss of dopamine from the brain, is critical, as is the magnesium. This is true for most autistic children. (It is speculated that the high upsurge of autism may be related to a modern medical practice; see Chapter 8.)

A number of years ago, a group of neuroscientists meeting at a Johns Hopkins symposium released a joint statement that I love: "Workings of the mind become scrambled when brain chemistry goes awry." They noted that specifically affected are:

• thoughts
• feelings
• self-awareness
• perception
• memory

How can we hope to act and feel normal if our "mental" balance is askew?

Another genius, the late Roger Williams, Ph.D., a University of Texas biochemist, discovered that actual optimal levels of natural brain chemicals can differ widely from person to person. This was an astonishing idea — that any two persons' requirements of these molecular chemicals might be vastly different, and so, on the same recommended daily allowance (RDA), one person stays healthy while the other limps through life never feeling normal!

The Safety of Our Natural Chemicals
— and the Healing Power of Our Bodies

Dr. Pauling devoted much time to determining ideal doses of vitamins and other natural chemicals in the body. He concluded that there was great misrepresentation by some medical and scientific journals and by the media about the toxicity and harmful side effects of nutrients taken in greater quantities than the RDA. He called it "a bias based upon a lack of knowledge." An example he cited was about a toddler who swallowed the entire contents of a bottle of vitamin A and began to feel nauseous and headachy. The toddler was treated and then released from the local hospital. Newspapers across the country carried the headline poisoning by vitamin a. Yet every day children die from aspirin poisoning — and these deaths go unreported.

Natural substances that belong in our bodies have remarkably low toxicity, especially when compared to drugs, which, in general, are highly toxic and sometimes prescribed in doses close to lethal levels. For example, a registered nurse in her forties came to my office recently to discuss her fear that she was becoming disabled from prescribed drugs. Between her physician and her psychiatrist, she was taking nine different drugs. Some of them were addictive; others were combining to create an unsafe level of toxicity. I couldn't believe it when she told me that her doctors were treating the side effects of her prescriptions with more drugs! Furthermore, I was horrified that even a registered nurse had unwittingly found herself on a regimen where she ingested enough toxic substances daily to systematically worsen her health!

Fortunately, there was another way to treat this woman's health problems, and it involved giving her body the nutritional means to heal itself. That's a very important concept: Our bodies are supposed to heal themselves. When we get an infection, the body is supposed to cure it. When we are injured, the body is supposed to heal. It does this innumerable times each day of our lives.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer put it eloquently: "We doctors don't do anything except help the doctor within." Our bodies are hardwired to be self-healing, but to do so they must be given the optimum natural substances needed. And compared to drugs, these natural chemicals are quite safe. So, you may wonder, why did the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set the RDA levels so unrealistically low? Dr. Linus Pauling also asked that question, and answered it himself. After studying the RDA standards thoroughly, this famous Nobel Prize winner concluded that the RDA's daily nutrient allowances are "enough to keep people barely alive in ordinary poor health."

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.