Nutrition is Key to Mental Health

The principal remedy for all the conditions that are called "mental illness" is nutrition, nutrition, nutrition.

The Standard American Diet does not provide enough nutrition in any case because of depleted soils, the addition of sugar and additives to everything, and the high stress even ordinary people are under. When people are under more stress than they know how to handle, they tend to quit eating ordinary food and eat sugar-saturated foods and drink soda as comfort foods. This starts the downhill saga.

Nutritional supplements should be paid for by public funds as the medications are, because they are life-enhancing.

The prime focus of treatment for any health problem should be to help the patient to recover and get back to normal life. The medical community has found no way yet of identifying mental illness as a disease that distinguishes it from other human conditions, despite decades of trying. ("Does Mental Illness Exist?" by Lawrence Stevens, J. D. in www.antipsychiatry.com) However, this does not justify labeling persons as mentally ill and treating them in such a way that their illness is guaranteed to continue and in fact, worsen greatly. This is the effect of present treatment.

While the doctors here brag about their 0 percent recovery rate for treating mental illness, the doctors in Canada have been quietly building their expertise in orthomolecular treatment. They have a 90 percent recovery rate for treating mental illness. For people who have been treated in the official medical industry for 10 years or more, they have a 50 percent recovery rate. Many books are in the library by Dr. Carl C. Pfeiffer, Dr. Abram Hoffer and others. Order a 50 minute video Masks of Madness: Science of Healing, hosted by Margot Kidder, featuring Abram Hoffer, MD, PhD for $39.95 pp from Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation, 16 Florence Avenue, Toronto, ON M2N 1E9. 416-733-2117

In 1955, I was locked up because of alleged mental illness or because I was reluctant to accept the isolation, boredom, belittling, enforced friendlessness, and disregard in the rural community where I was the mother of four children under five years old. There was no household help with gardening, canning, nor bread-baking, not to mention child care. We were not allowed to think of divorce.

One important consideration that we should not lose sight of is that in the winter that preceded my illness, I had been painting the rooms in our house. My husband was a farmer and thus was out of the house 16 or more hours a day. In winter, he could watch the children. I thought the paint smell would be bad for the children in the closed-up house, but that could not be helped. It was the toxic paint smell, plus the farm chemicals, some of which have since been outlawed in the US, that precipitated my illness.

Many people even now are diagnosed as mentally ill because doctors do not recognize Chemical Injury. They have not been taught to be aware of chemical sensitivities in their patients... Chemical Injury often results in psychiatric difficulties which are diagnosed by medical doctors as mental illness. One of our members was brought to a hospital in a severe chemical reaction. She was sent to the psychiatric ward where an R.N., thinking she was just another mental patient, used rubber gloves on her even though there was a sign above her bed and she was wearing a wrist band saying she was allergic to rubber gloves. In the following life-threatening chemical reaction, she was savagely put into 5-point restraints and shot with Haldol and Atavan.

Theron Randolph, M.D. has found a way to bring many diseases of unknown etiology (including mental illness) into remission without drugs. See: www.ciin.org. or order Our Toxic Times from P. O. Box 301, White Sulphur Springs, Montana 59645. 406-547-2255. Or New Horizons from P.O.Box 6085, Minneapolis, MN 55406

Doctors have not been taught about the damages from the medications they prescribe, either. When a person is suffering the rebound psychosis when slowly discontinuing medications, as they need to, the doctors declare their symptoms are a recurrence of the "disease" and prescribe even more of the toxic products that cause the problem.

I was slowly taken off the drugs before they would release me from the hospital and before my husband would accept me back home. It took me seven years to recover from the drugs and shock treatment and be proficient in reading again. I had four more children, went to college during the time my first four children were in college, became a Social Worker for the State of Minnesota, and started the non-profit, Well Mind Association of Minnesota in 1994. We now have a website: www.wellmindminnesota.com

The most important cause of psychiatric disability is too much medication for too long after psychotic breakdown. N.S. Lehrman, M.D, former Clinical Director, Kingsboro Psychiatric Center, Brooklyn states:

I started in psychiatry in 1947, was Clinical Director at Brooklyn¹s Kingsboro Psychiatric Center for 5 1/2 years ending in September, 1978, and from then until 1981, a part-time staff psychiatrist at one Creedmoor aftercare clinic and consultant to most of the others. In 1983,.... I felt then, as I do now, that the OMH should greatly raise its sights: that its goal should be returning patients to useful and satisfying living rather than merely maintaining them as drugged cripples. But doing this requires medication reduction.
The "intensive case management" for which OMH seeks over 10,000 new positions is nothing more than drug-pushing baby-sitting. This is demonstrated by the account of "a day in the life of an intensive case manager" in the June, 2001 OMH Quarterly. It clearly shows that the manager¹s primary goal is to maintain the client in status quo by ensuring that he takes his medication and seeing that he gets to pharmacies, doctors' appointments, food-pantries and the like. Since nothing is said about helping the client return to productive living, that is clearly outside the "intensive case manager's" scope.
The reason for electroconvulsive therapy¹s recent resurrection is simple: to hide the brain damage caused by the endless drugging upon which today¹s psychiatry is based, by focusing instead on a treatment causing even more brain damage: ECT. The focus on it has diverted attention from the economically more important, and the clinically much more harmful, gross, routine overuse of drugs.

These medications usefully suppress symptoms while harmfully inhibiting the capacity to think. EST suppresses symptoms even more strikingly while also permanently inhibiting the capacity to think. After acute crises have passed, drugs should therefore be gradually reduced and, if possible, eliminated. Gradual reduction of useful but toxic drugs, such as cortisone, is standard throughout medicine. And the studies of the many patients who have recovered completely from psychosis reveal that they have stopped prescribed drugs. And having been in practice before the drug era, I can personally attest that chronicity continues much longer today than it did then.

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Well Mind Association of Minnesota
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