A Holistic Approach to Mental Illness
Article by Stefan Burns - Updated November 2021. Join the Wild Free Organic email newsletter!
Worldwide one billion or more people suffer from various mental illnesses. These mental disorders are mental or behavioral patterns that cause impairment or significant distress of personal functioning. Even though these disorders all exist within the mind, mental illness can severely impact interaction with the world and even prove deadly.
Depression and other mental illnesses are nothing to scoff at, and due to their nature they require immediately treatment.
Depending on the situation, natural solutions are often the best alternative.
Mental illnesses can range from mild to deadly, and they can form a pattern of progression.
Some common mental illnesses are:
Depression*
Anxiety
Autism
Attention deficit disorder (ADD)
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Eating and Sleep Disorders
Dementia
Alzhiemers
Migraines
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Schizophrenia
*Nearly one-half of those diagnosed with depression are also diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
Combating Mental Illness
To combat mental disorders, thousands have dedicated their lives to learn, diagnose, and treat the above illnesses and more. Current recommended treatments include psychiatry, brain stimulation training, and medication. Psychiatry, the rewiring of the brain via dialogue with a specialist is expensive, as is brain stimulation (a field still in its infancy). As a result, many people with mental illness are steered towards medications like SSRIs as the primary means to deal with their mental illness.
The approach for how to deal with mental illness by the medical system has done a lot of good, helping and healing many people of serious mental conditions, but their recommendations and research are outdated. The pharmaceutical industry has turned mental illness into a money maker, and if more costly human to human methods like psychiatry aren’t covered by insurance, then doctors prescribe drugs.
Meanwhile from the medical community, very little attention is given to simple preventative measures and healing techniques well-known to improve mental wellness. To begin understanding how mental illness can be treated holistically, we need to understand the conditions that give rise to mental illness, starting from the outside inwards.
Brain-Gut Inflammation
Extensive research has shown that brain inflammation is connected to virtually all types of mental illness. Mood disorders such as depression (1) and anxiety (2), as well as more serious conditions like autism (3), dementia (4), alzheimer’s disease (5), and schizophrenia (6) have all been linked to inflammation of the brain or various parts of the body. Inflammation is not the ultimate root cause of these mental health issues, but understanding how to combat inflammation can provide relief and allow more holistic wellness measures heal the underlying trauma.
As discussed in our article on the importance of drinking water, everything that you are is built from what you’ve ate, drank, and breathed in over the course of your life. These are your starting conditions from which all else is determined, and as such your diet is supremely important in determining your level of health. You are what you eat, and an inflammatory state of the body or mind ultimately goes back to the quality of the food you eat, the water you drink, and the air you breathe.
After eating or drinking, your body needs to digest the food and actually assimilate it into the body. Your entire digestive system is actually outside your body. It might be contained inside your flesh and blood, but the entire digestive system is lined with cells and mucus whose primary purpose is to keep foreign invaders out and good nutrients coming in. Inside your digestive system lives your microbiome, a colony of 100 trillion microorganisms that outnumber your human cells ten to one. Just like your health, you can have a healthy or diseases microbiome. When the microbiome is highly pathogenic, the immune system has to work on overtime keeping the body free or opportunistic pathogenic bacteria. A stressed immune system causes inflammation as an acute protective measure, and inflammation can also be created in the gut when undigested foods leak through compromised tight-junctions of the intestines and into the blood stream. These food particles also require cleanup by the immune system.
The gut is the main center for the immune system, and when the digestive system is unhealthy and diseased, the effects are felt throughout the body, most notably as chronic inflammation. This is for healing mental illnesses because if the gut is the main source of inflammation in the body, then healing the gut will have a strong impact on reducing conditions like depression, insomnia, and autism. This connection is further strengthened by the knowledge of the gut-brain connection. The microbiome is able to create and secrete neurotransmitters which directly affect behavior and brain function.
I have written about the gut extensively in my other articles, read these for a more complete understanding of how the digestive system and how it affects your health and wellness.
Heal Tight Junctions of the Gut
Control Food Cravings
Break a Sugar Addiction
The most effective method to heal the digestive is with fasting because it deprives the microbiome of food, selecting for symbiotic microbes while providing the gut a chance to heal and strengthen.
To begin the healing process for mental disorders, a close examination of the health of the gut is needed.
Spend Time in Nature
The emotions common to depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses are those of fear, sadness, anger, hate, hopelessness, and despair. If you don’t change your environment to see the bigger picture, it is easy to get twisted around by these emotions and the whole situations can feel insurmountable. It is for this reason that spending time in nature can be such a boon for you or a loved one’s mental health.
Being in nature opens up the senses and overwhelms you with emotions of awe, happiness, inspiration, serenity, and calmness. Surrounded by the wonder of nature, it becomes easier to see the bigger picture of life and to feel the healing energy of the Earth.
If you’re physically able, going for a hike is a way to experience nature while also providing concrete goals which when achieved provides a sense of satisfaction. Away from the noise and distractions of human society, with the elements around you, it’s difficult to be consumed by your worries and troubling thoughts. If physically unable, even just exposing yourself to green space and color can improve your mood and outlook on life. Spending time with Mother Earth is a helpful compliment to a mental illness treatment plan. Nature improves mindfulness, quiets the mind, and offers the opportunity to connect to the core of yourself.
Often just coming into contact with deeply buried emotional trauma and recognizing while letting it pass is enough to heal from it.
Emotional Trauma
The trigger for a lot of mental illness to begin or grow is emotional trauma. This emotional trauma can happen suddenly, like with the passing of a beloved friend or family member, or it can be buried deep from past traumatic experiences.
It is by unpacking and discussing emotional trauma in a safe supportive space that makes psychiatry so effective in treating mental illness. If having psychiatry with a trained professional is too cost prohibitive, there are many ways to replicate the effect.
Share and unpack your emotional burdens with a friend or family member after establish a safe space free of judgement or criticism.
Create a safe supportive environment on your own and write your thoughts, emotions, and feelings into a journal. Don’t hold back. At the end you can either keep the written words to reflect upon, or finish the ceremony by symbolically releasing yourself from the trauma by lighting the pages on fire.
If you attend school or if your work has a program, speak to a counselor and make a consistent schedule of it. It takes time to deconstruct emotions, it won’t happen all at once.
Speak to a counselor using an online-only service like betterhelp.
Join a spiritual community for emotional support and guidance.
Discussing your emotions and feelings with others or God can release your emotional trauma which might sit at the core of your mental illness. Taken with steps to improve health and connect with nature, mental health can be healed holistically.
Sulforaphane instead of Medication
While there are many positive stories of drugs like Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) helping people regain control of their life, there are also many horror stories from the side-effects of mental illness drugs. Sometimes the side effects like liver damage, weight gain, and insomnia are worse than the starting condition. Knowing the connection between inflammation and mental illness, a natural anti-inflammatory can be used to combat the effects of depression, anxiety, autism, and other disorders. Sulforaphane is one such anti-inflammatory chemical.
Sulforaphane is a sulfur-rich naturally occurring compound found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, and kale which has many known health benefits (7). Sulforaphane is a defense chemical produced when it is crunched and chewed up, and its chemistry useful to plants is also useful for human health. Sulforaphane is able to cross the blood-brain barrier, and once there it can exert its effects on glutamate (a neurotransmitter) and glutathione (an antioxidant) chemistry via gene activation. It’s for this reason that sulforaphane is able to have profoundly healing effects on various mental disorders. Sulforaphane also has potent anti-inflammatory effects throughout the body.
Sulforaphane supplementation has been shown to help with humans for schizophrenia (8) and autism (9), and initial mouse models show sulforaphane has powerful beneficial effects on depression (10), anxiety (11), and alzheimer’s disease (12). Sulforaphane appears to be especially important for healthy brain development in juvenile and adolescents (13).
For depression, no human studies have been completed yet, but initial results with mice are very promising (14). Expect human studies testing sulforaphane against depression to release their results in 2021 (15).
For normal dosages of 50-100 mg, sulforaphane has no known side-effects, and anecdotally it has been reported to have similar efficacy as SSRIs in treating depression and it .
Sources of Sulforaphane
The holistic wellness mental illness treatment plan is below, but first it is important to learn more about sulforaphane and how it works. Consuming sulforaphane naturally in the diet is superior to taking a supplement, and increasing sulforaphane intake through good dietary habits is a lasting strategy for success.
Cabbage and broccoli sprouts are the best sources of sulforaphane.
Sulforaphane is created when glucoraphanin comes into contact with myrosinase, a family of enzymes that play a role in the defense response of plants, hence why sulforaphane is only activated when vegetables are chewed or chopped. Cooking degrades and destroys sulforaphane production, so raw and chopped vegetables have the highest levels of sulforaphane. Green cabbage is one of the best known sources of Sulforaphane at 0.5 mg per gram, and it appears red cruciferous vegetables contain much less sulforaphane than common sources like broccoli sprouts.
Broccoli is a very common vegetable with high levels of sulforaphane, and the state of broccoli and it’s level of cooking determine its sulforaphane content. Cooking at temperatures above 70 °C can greatly reduce the amount of sulforaphane, so here we’ll look at the amount of sulforaphane found in various forms of raw broccoli.
Note - Cooking broccoli will destroy the myrosinase needed to convert glucoraphanin into sulforaphane, but adding mustard seeds conveniently reintroduces myrosinase back into the reaction. Brown mustard seed added to cooked broccoli increases the bioavailibility of sulforaphane by 4x (18).
The best way to get any nutrient overall is through a whole unprocessed diet with ample vegetables. All macronutrients, micronutrients, and other chemicals such as phytonutrients all work together in balance as found naturally in food to promote optimal health. This is true for Sulforaphane.
A couple cups of chopped cabbage will provide about 100 mg of sulforaphane (19). Broccoli and brussel sprouts are further behind at 20 and 10 mg of sulforaphane respectively per cup chopped.
Sulforaphane-rich broccoli sprouts!
Broccoli sprouts and seeds are very dense sources of sulforaphane. This is because sulforaphane is a protective compound and is more highly concentrated in younger versions of plant growth. Along the same lines, Sulforaphane content is actually increased when cruciferous vegetables are subjected to heat and pressure stress. A healthy microbiome is also able to convert glucoraphanin into sulforaphane (20), the extent depending on the makeup of your gut.
When broccoli sprouts are heated to between 60-70°C, sulforaphane is increased by about 3.5x (21). Heat too high and the enzyme myrosinase is destroyed, stopping the reaction which creates sulforaphane from occurring. To easily heat broccoli sprouts to 70°C add a cup of boiling water to half a cup of room-temperature water. The resulting water will be about 75°C, and when added to the glass jar containing the sprouts, the final temperature will settle around 70°C.
Holistic Wellness Mental Depression Action Plan
If you or a loved one is suffering from mental illness of any sort, it is important you begin addressing the issue as soon as possible and don’t let it fester and grow. Being mindful of the emotions wrapped up with mental illness, a holistic wellness plan is one of the safest ways you can begin to treat mental conditions like depression, autism, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and more.
Eat a diet rich in sulforaphane to tamp down on inflammation of the mind, body, and gut. Eating 7-9 servings of fruits and vegetables every day, mostly raw, will help heal the gut, ensure ample micronutrients are consumed, and will reduce chronic inflammation. Starting off, eating 7-9 servings of fruits and vegetables can seem like an impossible task, so at the minimum eat 1 cup of light sauteed cabbage everyday and take 50 mg of sulforaphane via a supplement like BroccoMax by Jarrow Formulas. Each pill contains 30 mg of sulforaphane, so take two daily, one in the morning and one at night for lasting all day anti-inflammatory effects. If you eat the cabbage and take the sulforaphane pills everyday you’ll get 110 mg of sulforaphane daily, which should dramatically improve the symptoms of mental illness.
Heal your digestive system and regain control over a diseased microbiome. The simplest method to reset your microbiome is with fasting, and in-between fasting you will want to heal epithelial tight junctions in order to reduce the inflammation from the microbiome die-off reactions. To heal tight junctions you’ll need zinc either from zinc rich foods like oysters or from a Zinc Balance supplement like the one from Jarrow. Flavenoids also heal the gut so drink a cup of green tea or eat some fermented soy every now and then.
Spend time in nature experiencing the emotions of awe, inspiration, and serenity. Use nature as a playground for experimentation where you can set goals and achieve them. Go for a hike or make a commitment to meditate for a certain length of time. Start a garden and care for some plants, which only need sunlight, water, food, and love to grow, which is all you need too! By spending time with Mother Earth you will become more mindful and you’ll experience the powerful healing effects of grounding.
Go for a walk and get your body moving. Walking is one of the easiest things you can do, being bipedal we evolved to be good at it, and if you can get yourself out the door then I can guarentee you’ll feel better at the end of the walk. Walking goes hand in hand with point #3 above.
Unpack your trauma with the help of professionals or loved ones. Better yet face these emotional traumas in the healing presence of nature. Look inward, touch the deep parts of your being, recognize the emotions, and let them pass like a wave in a non-reactive manner. The past is the past, you have to let yourself become liberated. You can do anything you want to do, it all depends on what your innate desires are, and what you wish to manifest.
Liberate Yourself from Mental Illness
Mental illness is like a deep hole that you’ve been dropped in, and the light at the top seems so far away. It can feel hopeless and impossible to climb out of mental illness, but anything is possible. Mental illness starts in the mind, and it can be conquered in the mind. Mindset is everything, and the action plan above will help cultivate a new healthy lifestyle while also shifting your mindset to be default positive and happy.
A healthy diet full of whole unprocessed foods and vegetables is one of the best preventative health measures, and sulforaphane supplementation will give you a leg up. If you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, insomnia, or other mental disorders, make the strongest effort possible to exercise and eat right. Get eight hours of sleep every night. Enlist the help of friends and family to achieve your goals. The simplest changes have the biggest wellness impacts!
And if you’re ever having troubling or suicidal thoughts please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, available 24 hours a day. 1-800-273-8255
Updated November 2020
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