by Kieron McFadden
The Stone Age of psychiatric drugs gives way to the new Bronze Age of nutrition. The blunt answer to the question asked in the title of this article is: "No, we don't need psychiatric drugs."
The Stone Age of psychiatric drugs gives way to the new Bronze Age of nutrition.
The blunt answer to the question asked in the title of this article is: "No, we don't need psychiatric drugs."
Hope Re-Born
This is actually very good news and heralds an era of re-born hope in the field of mental health, yet the pharmaceutical industry spends more on advertising than it does on research in a concerted campaign to convince us of the opposite answer, to sell us on the idea of using drugs to resolve mental problems.
In so doing they are in the position of a car salesman pulling out all the stops so as to sell us a model of car already several years out of date and which was, even in its heyday, a hideous liability of a contraption in any case.
The concept of using chemical concoctions to alter "brain chemistry" so as to resolve mental difficulties - as technologies go about as subtle and precise as using bashing someone in the head with a baseball bat so as to cure his toothache - has in fact been rendered as redundant as the Stone Age by modern advances in nutrition and psychotherapy.
Massive marketing and promotional efforts have managed to keep this from the view of the general public for a while but the truth has a way of penetrating even the amour plate of the pharmaceutical dinosaurs.
Superior Methods
Methods far superior to and safer than drugs now exist and are available. You do not need to take the drugs proffered by psychiatry in lieu of actually being made well, nor suffer their appalling debilitative effects and complications, nor endure the life sentence of such suffering that embarkation upon the psychiatric-pharmaceutical road so frequently entails.
You just don't need it. Period.
So why bother? Why go through hell for no good reason? Of course the drug route will be immensely profitable for the psychiatric-pharmaceutical axis if they can entice you and many million others onto it. But do you owe the drug companies that much that you will permit yourself to be damaged in order that they and their shareholders can continue to be rich?
It is true that the reason so many people are lured onto the drug route is that they are unaware that better alternatives exist and there has no doubt been a considerable expenditure of effort by vested interests to ensure the continuation of that ignorance.
But let us for now, for the purposes of this short essay, take just two simple examples.
Feeling Depressed?
If you are, psychiatry will persuade you to take an antidepressant. And you only have to read the drug's warning label to know what a minefield of potential harm you are walking into if you let yourself be so persuaded.
But did you know that in no less than twenty three random clinical trials, the natural herb St John's Wort, was found to be as effective, if not actually more effective, than routine antidepressant drugs. St John's Wort comes however without the dangerous side effects of the pharmaceutical concoctions. (see Leslie Kenton's book "Healing Herbs," published by Random House in 2002)
Blue-green Algae too - of which you will be hearing a lot more in the near future - are a useful mood elevator, with a host of other wonderful benefits besides (see Miracle Superfood: Blue-Green Algae by Gillian McKeith Ph.D., published by Keats Publishing, Los Angeles).
The motto is: nutrition is better medicine than drugs.
This is but a very brief glance at a very large chunk of good news. I sincerely hope it helps by pointing you on the right (and safe) direction.
