Raising Awareness: Non-Pharmocological Treatment

October 7-13 is Mental Illness Awareness Week. What do you think is one thing people need to be more aware of concerning mental illness?

I have so many things I would want people to be aware of. Of course one of the main things I would like people to actually accept is that mental illness is real. But the other thing I think we do not speak about nearly enough are all the non-pharmacological treatments for mental illness. I am eternally frustrated when I see people (adults and children) heavily medicated, on medicines that risk their life due to serious side effects, and no one tells them the other things they could try to do for treatment. Many non-pharmacological things work in treatment to either decrease the amount of drugs you need to take or some people don't even need prescription medications anymore.

Why do we make people go through this? Why do we not inform people of all the options they have? Why don't we give them the best chance at a stable life?

There is too much stigma around non-prescription treatments- assuming that if you can treat an illness through anything other than a pill then the illness is not real. But that is just not true. Heart disease is real and it can be treated with diet and lifestyle changes. Some forms of diabetes can be treated with diet and people can decrease or stop needing insulin injections. Diet is used in the treatment of epilepsy when medications are not working. Celiac disease is treated with a gluten free diet as are all other food allergies. There is no reason to think that because mental illness can be treated with things like diet, exercise, sleep schedule, meditation, supplements, etc... that it is not a real illness.

From NAMI's Facebook Page

Mental illnesses are chemical imbalances or damage in the brain and things like diet and exercise can change the balance of those chemicals or help repair the brain. For instance serotonin is often one of the chemicals that is out of balance, too low in people with depression. Sugar increases serotonin, but then it also produces a crash and creates mood fluctuations and that can create the chemical imbalance of bipolar. Not eating sugar and other simple carbohydrates can help balance serotonin so it does not have extreme highs and lows. Exercise helps in the treatment of ADD, depression, bipolar and more because it effects neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine and dopamine. Exercise also helps regulate the amygdala which is one of the parts of our brain affected in PTSD. Also, as Sharon Begley describes in her book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, meditation helps change our brain due to neuroplasticity (the ability for our brains to change, rewire itself.) Meditation has been successful in treatment of mental illness as well because it changes the pathways in your brain, this is especially helpful in PTSD and brain injury.

Nothing showed me just how easy it is to change our brain with things like food than an experience with my son.

We noticed my son was having emotional breakdowns. Crying over small things that, while annoying, were not things you would just fall apart for hours over. He is normally a totally happy and smiling kid who listens and is really easy to take care of. We knew something was wrong and we had already been researching diet and it's affect on mental illness for me and my husband has a gluten intolerance. We noticed when we cut out gluten we all felt better, but my son still had these breakdowns so we we started paying more attention to exactly what he was eating. We noticed that when he ate corn, a few hours later, he was a wreck! So, we cut out corn (even corn syrup), and he rarely has these episodes except when we eat out or he is at a friends house. No matter how hard we try to avoid it, corn is snuck into everything especially in the form of corn syrup. Even pre-made hamburger patties have corn in them sometimes so you may think you are just eating meat but you are not. We even noticed during school testing week that on the days our son had a breakfast of protein and carbs he was able to sit and focus longer for the test. On the one day I just gave him fruit and gluten-free pancakes, he had a hard time concentrating and sitting during the test so much so that his teacher asked me if he was feeling ok. I know that if he goes to a party or spends the day at the amusement park and we did not pack food for him, he will be sad, cry easily, and even withdraw to his room for hours. All because of the food he ate.

I recommend that all of this be supervised by your doctor and if you do not have a doctor willing to look at things outside of the medicine cabinet, then find a new one. It can be hard. For at least ten years doctors have been telling me "the research shows these things work" but they don't have enough experience to use it in treatment, telling me to experiment on my own. Not helpful! I finally found doctors this year who have enough experience and education on these treatments that they do use them.

If we as patients insist that we want to know ALL of our treatment options, we can make a difference. So I want to raise awareness to my fellow friends with mental illness and let you know that you have many options in your treatment plan. You have the right to insist that you are informed about them and are treated with them. We can demand more testing so that more doctors recognize these treatments as successful. Our lives are worth this fight.

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

Mindfulness and Brain Health

I preached this weekend about mindfulness and brain health. In specific, how mindfulness has been proven as a treatment for things like anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and other forms of mental illness. It is works for chronic pain, eating disorders, and many other illnesses. Mindfulness is something we all can use in order to help our mental state, and it is part of the Dr. Andrew Weil's  regimen in his book Spontaneous Happiness.

Mindfulness means we are fully in the present moment, we do not judge the moment as good or bad, we accept it as it is. We are not looking to the future, worrying about the past, or multitasking. The way we cultivate mindfulness is through meditation which can be done in a variety of ways. You can meditate in the Zen style, sitting still, counting each breath up to ten and when thoughts invade your mind, bring yourself back to breathing and start over at number one again. You can do object mediation where you focus on something like a candle flame. You can practice art meditation such as Zentangles which helps focus the mind.

Zentangles

Here are a few excerpts from my sermon, On Purpose from April 29, 2012. I hope you will find ways to incorporate mindfulness into your life.

Much of the research that has been done showing how mindfulness and meditation affects the brain has been done with the Dali Lama and his monks. Over the years, monks with between five and fifty five years of mediation experience have been tested by neuroscientists. Even occasional home based Buddhists, the ones like you and I who might meditate at home and go to a few retreats have been tested. They were hooked up to brain imaging machines and studied in many different ways. Overall, they have found that people who are mindful have the ability to focus their brains so well they can change their moods, feelings, and outlook on life. You can physically see the difference in their brains through brain imaging. The monks produced gamma waves that were 30 times as strong as the non-meditating participants in one study. Also, larger areas of the monks brains were active, especially in the left prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions... (research found in Buddha on the Brain by John Geirland)

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a mental illness that is very hard to treat. For years, and still now, many doctors use a method called Exposure and Response Prevention, or ERP. This is when a doctor exposes their patient to their deepest fears in order to show them that they are not really scary. For someone who believes the world is full of germs, the doctor would make the patient touch doorknobs and public restrooms but not allow the person to wash their hands afterwards. While some people improve, ERP is so traumatic that most people can’t finish the process. Finally in the late 1980’s Dr. Schwartz from UCLA came along and said, not only does this not work, but it is cruelty. Instead, he decided to research if mindfulness could be an effective form of treatment for OCD. 

Technically, OCD is a misfiring of the wiring in your brain. Your brain tells you there is some extremely terrifying thing that really does not exist. Dr. Schwartz believed training people to be mindful would allow them to observe the misfire in the wiring, the sensation and thoughts of fear, but to let those thoughts pass, seeing them as a glitch in their mind that is not real. This switches the thinking from “The world is full of germs and I need to wash my hands until they bleed” to “That is a brain-wiring problem, I don’t actually need to wash my hands.”

Meditation cushions. Photo by Jeff Norris

Dr. Shwartz set up a study of mindfulness and OCD and used positron-emission tomograhy, or PET scans, to measure what was going on inside people’s brains. The PET scans showed that the people who practiced mindfulness were able to calm their brain. With OCD, there is an over activity in the orbital frontal cortex of the brain. The PET scans found readings in that area of the brain decreased with mindfulness training, people were rewiring the faulty circuiting, altering their brain chemistry. Not only did this show up on the scans, but the people with OCD actually got better and stayed well, with no medication used. (OCD research found in Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley)

Now mindfulness is used for treating anxiety, depression, and other forms of mental illness. The science is able to see the faulty brain chemistry through different types of scans, so it proves there is a medical problem, but the mindfulness practice then proves that there are other things, besides medication, which can change that chemistry. Our brains have the ability to heal themselves. Some people with severe mental illness have been able to decrease their medications to the point that they can go back to work because adding mindfulness to their treatment meant they rewired enough of their brain to need less medication. As you know many of these medications make you shake, sleepy, almost comatose, and severely impair cognitive functioning. Mindfulness has enabled people to not only manage their illness, like the medication does, but get their life back, which often the medication takes away... Management does not mean cure, but it does mean a better quality of life, which everyone deserves. 

Here are some of my favorite resources about mindfulness and meditation:
Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Spontaneous Happiness by Andrew Weil, MD
Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana
Buddha Mom by Jacqueline Kramer 
Baby Buddhas: A Guide to Teaching Meditation to Children by Lisa Desmond
Zentangles

Blessings,

Rev. Katie