A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives. Dr Brogan Kelly
already begun to explore the evidence that there really isn’t much to support the efficacy of most medications and medical interventions, particularly in psychiatry, where suppressed data and industry-funded and ghostwritten papers hide the truth. Another 2013 study published in the equally respected Mayo Clinic Proceedings confirmed that a whopping 40 percent of current medical practice should be thrown out.6 Unfortunately, it takes an average of seventeen years for the data that exposes inefficacy and/or a signal of harm to trickle down into your doctor’s daily routine, a time lag problem that makes medicine’s standard of care evidence-based only in theory and not practice.7 Dr. Richard Horton, the editor in chief of the much-revered Lancet at this writing, has broken rank and come forward about what he really thinks about published research—that it’s unreliable at best, if not completely false. In a 2015 published statement, he wrote: “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”8
In 2011 the British Medical Journal performed a general analysis of some 2,500 common medical treatments. The goal was to determine which ones are supported by sufficient reliable evidence.9 The results:
▶ 13 percent were found to be beneficial
▶ 23 percent were likely to be beneficial
▶ 8 percent were as likely to be harmful as beneficial
▶ 6 percent were unlikely to be beneficial
▶ 4 percent were likely to be harmful or ineffective
The treatments in the remaining 46 percent, the largest category, were found to be unknown in their effectiveness. Put simply, when you visit a doctor or hospital, you have only a 36 percent chance that you’ll receive a treatment that has been scientifically proven to be either beneficial or likely to be beneficial. Such results are strikingly similar to those of Dr. Brian Berman, who analyzed completed Cochrane reviews of conventional medical practices, finding that 38 percent of treatments were positive and 62 percent were negative or showed “no evidence of effect.”10
Are there exceptions? I would like to argue that there aren’t. This is because the whole pharmaceutical approach is predicated on wrong-headed information. Pharmaceutical products as we know them have not been developed or studied with modern science’s most relevant principles in mind, such as the complexity and power of the human microbiome, the impact of low-dose toxic exposures, autoimmune disorders as a sign of environmental overstimulation, and the fundamental importance of individual biochemistry. Because medicine operates under the now antiquated one gene, one illness, one pill rubric, efficacy will be measured through a skewed lens, and safety cannot be accurately assessed or discussed with individual patients.
Many of us move through life with a sneaking fear that the other health shoe could drop at any moment. We can easily fall prey to the belief that our breasts are ticking time bombs, that infections are just a cough or handshake away, and that life is a process of adding more medications and drugs to put out small fires as we age. Before I stopped prescribing, I had never once cured a patient. Now people are cured every week in my practice. As I mentioned, my patients are my partners. We collaborate, and they work hard. They work hard at a time when they feel they can’t even lift a finger—when the prospect of walking to the drugstore with a slip of paper twinkles like the North Star in their dark sky. They follow my lead because they feel inspired by my conviction and hope in this new model—one that asks the question “Why?” and has the goal of not only symptom relief but an incredible boost in their vitality.
I realize that many of you reading this book may fear the change that will happen if you take my advice seriously. But no situation has ever been more easily resolved, better handled, or supported by freaking out. Responding with fear leads us to make decisions that are myopic. Some of these decisions may ease our sense of disorder, but they simultaneously engender new and more complex problems. Instead, when you have a symptom—when you feel cloudy, sad, sore, gassy, weepy, tired, or unnecessarily anxious—bring some wonder to it. Ask why and try to make the connections. Your body’s symptoms are telling you something about equilibrium. Your body is trying to tell you that it has lost balance. Stand back and appreciate the infinite complexity of your organism. Know that fear will only drive you to treat your body like a robotic machine that needs oil and gear changes. We are so much more than buttons and levers.
So it’s time to put on some new glasses and start to study your body. Start to think critically about what you buy, the medical advice you take, and what the media tells you to worry about. Let light shine on every dark corner of your beliefs about health. This critical thinking will liberate you to realize your full potential as a parent, spouse, or friend, and within your own sphere of existence. As one of my favorite quotes goes: “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”
In the rest of this chapter, we’re going to take a tour of what depression is—from its true definition and biology to its myriad causes and the colossal failure of the pharmaceutical industry to treat this health challenge that has swiftly become the leading cause of disability in America and the rest of the world.11 This will help ease your fears about the change that you’re about to make and set the stage for the balance of the book. And I’ll start with one of the most pervasive and harmful myths about depression.
DEPRESSION IS NOT A DISEASE12
Psychiatry, unlike other fields of medicine, is based on a highly subjective diagnostic system. Essentially you sit in the office with a physician and you are labeled based on the doctor’s opinion of the symptoms you describe. There are no tests. You can’t pee in a cup or give a drop of blood to be analyzed for a substance that definitely indicates “you have depression” much in the way a blood test can tell you that you have diabetes or are anemic.
Psychiatry is infamous for saying “oops!” It has a long history of abusing patients with pseudoscience-driven treatments and has been sullied by its shameful lack of diagnostic rigor. Consider, for example, the 1949 Nobel Prize winner Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist who introduced invasive surgical techniques to treat people with schizophrenia by cutting connections between their prefrontal region and other parts of the brain (i.e., the prefrontal lobotomy). And then we had the Rosenhan experiment in the 1970s, which exposed how difficult it is for a doctor to distinguish between an “insane patient” and a sane patient acting insane. Today’s prescription pads for psychotropic drugs are, in my belief, just as harmful and absurd as physically destroying critical brain tissue or labeling people as “psychiatric” when really they are anything but.
My fellowship training was in consultation-liaison psychiatry, or “psychosomatic medicine.” I was drawn to this specialization because it seemed to be the only one that acknowledged physical processes and pathologies that could manifest behaviorally. I noticed that psychiatrists in this field appreciated the role of biological actions such as inflammation and the stress response. When I watched fellow psychiatrists consult on surgical patients in the hospital, they talked about these processes much differently from when they saw patients in their Park Avenue offices. They talked about delirium brought on by electrolyte imbalance, symptoms of dementia caused by B12 deficiency, and the onset of psychosis in someone who was recently prescribed antinausea medication. These root causes of mental challenges are far from the “it’s all in your head” banter that typically swirls around conversations about mental illness.
The word psychosomatic is a loaded and stigmatized term that implies “it’s all in your head.” Psychiatry remains the wastebasket for the shortcomings of conventional medicine in terms of diagnosing and treating. If doctors can’t explain your symptoms, or if the treatment doesn’t fix the problem and further testing doesn’t identify a concrete diagnosis, you’ll probably be referred to a psychiatrist or, more likely, be handed a prescription for an antidepressant by your family doctor. If you are very persistent that you still need real help, your doctor might throw an antipsychotic at you as well. Most prescriptions for antidepressants are