Not in the metaphorical sense of the word, but literally demented.

I was losing my memory… and I was losing my mind.

I was the Director of a clinical trials research center, where I served as the Principal Investigator on over 100 clinical trials with many different types of Psychiatric and Alzheimer’s medications. I conducted 20 long-term clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment, and while doing these trials, I began to realize that I was as cognitively impaired as my patients.

I had developed chemical sensitivity, and I became allergic to everything – foods, smells, medications, almost everything.

I was covered with itchy rashes that kept me up all night putting on lotions and topical steroids. I would break out in hives just from smelling things like the chemicals in a grocery store (if I managed to get enough energy to leave the house and go to the grocery store).

I had severe chronic fatigue, and I could barely get out of a chair for a year.

But the worst part was that the rampant inflammation that was ravaging my body was also eating up my brain!

I would do cognitive testing with my Alzheimer‘s patients, and I would give them three words to remember on the Mini Mental Status exam. I alternated between two different sets of words, and I suddenly found I had to write down which of the word sets I gave my patients, because I could not remember them anymore. And I had used these two sets of words regularly for more than 20 years!

Dialing a phone number could be a problem. I could get confused and have to start over – sometimes more than once! (It’s pretty scary when you have trouble dialing a phone number!)

I forgot how to do things on a computer. I would repeatedly ask my husband to show me things that I used to know how to do, and he would get annoyed, because he said he had just showed me. But I would not remember!

I had trouble with my driving and my visuo-spatial skills. I completely lost the ability to back up or to parallel park my car. My brain just could not sequence those complex motor tasks anymore.

My husband was once a passenger in my car and he said “Kat, what’s wrong with you? You’re driving like a little old lady!” I told him there were too many things coming at me while driving, and it was overwhelming. My processing speed and brain integration could not handle all of the rapid inputs I previously took for granted while driving.

I often could not understand what was being said. I kept going to my ENT and asking for hearing aids, and he would tell me that I only had a mild hearing loss, and that I did not need hearing aids. But one day, he looked at me funny, and said “the problem is not in your ears – it’s in your brain!”.

I did auditory testing, and found out that I had developed auditory processing problems. I had lost the ability to decode words whenever there was any background noise. I could only understand snatches of every word while in a restaurant or watching a movie. This was terrifying! I am a Psychiatrist, and I rely on my hearing for my profession. But I also rely on my hearing for my social life. Ands this auditory processing problem was reportedly not correctable.

So, I’m 50 years old, and my brain is degenerating rapidly. I’m allergic to everything, and all that traditional medicine could offer me was treatment with steroids to suppress my overactive immune system, but had nothing to cure me.

I knew that when I treated patients with dementia who were in their early 50s, the dementia would progress much more rapidly than later onset Alzheimer’s.

I chanced to hear about and attend a conference called Food as Medicine, which opened my eyes to the power of food and nutrition for healing the immune system. My roommate at the meeting was delighted to observe what we learned about food reactions as she got to watch what happened to me after eating a gluten free meal that we were served. I was still reacting to everything, and I turned fiery red all over, then proceeded to get sores under my eyes, under my arms, and all over my legs. Along with the accompanying fatigue and brain fog.

At the conference, I learned about The Institute for Functional Medicine, googled it, and found that their next training module was on Allergy and Autoimmune – just what I needed to know. So, I embarked on a course of study to save myself. And I needed to learn almost every facet of Functional Medicine in order to heal and reverse my dementia and chemical sensitivity!

If I had not learned Functional Medicine, I would have been drooling in a nursing home a long time ago!

After a very steep learning curve trying to learn Functional Medicine with a sieve for a brain, I gradually worked through all of the healing steps of Functional Medicine. I applied every Integrative Functional Medicine module I studied on myself. And I kept (and keep) studying and learning more – about infections and toxins and hormones and brain re-wiring.

Because I needed support on my learning path, I started a Functional Medicine study group made up of some of the most amazing Functional and Integrative healers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we have met monthly for over seven years now. When my group was quickly filled and closed to new members, together with a colleague I started the Bay Area Functional Medicine ListServ, which is a very active on-line group with over 300 members. I could have never learned all that I did without the connections of my Functional Medicine communities.

And gradually, my brain began to heal as my body began to heal. My brain started to come back on-line!

I still have some residual neurologic deficits, but they are now minor, and I feel optimistic that they will continue to resolve. It was a happy day when I realized I could hold a 7-digit phone number in my head again and dial the phone number without getting confused!

And I can now reflect on, and have tremendous gratitude for all I have learned through my personal dementia struggle. It has given me the tools to help my patients – to know with the deepest conviction that if we can find and resolve all of the factors that are driving someone’s dementia, we can create an environment for healing.

The post Brain in the Lost-and-Found: My Dementia Story appeared first on MindHealth360.

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The post I never took my mental health for granted, now I’m reaping the rewards appeared first on MindHealth360.

For a period of five years following my sons’ births, I suffered two depressions, manifesting as sometimes daily multiple panic and anxiety attacks, chronic insomnia, tears, hopelessness, social phobia, and often total disconnection from family and friends. It was a dark night of the soul, and I could barely recognize the person I had become. The happy, dynamic self I had been seemed to have permanently vanished.

Getting up in the morning after yet another sleepless night was agony, and carrying out the chores, responsibilities and activities of daily life took a gigantic physical and emotional effort. I was raw, would cry a lot, and felt a pervasive, relentless, emotional and physical exhaustion. Seeing people often felt terrifying, and I avoided social occasions and the school run as much as I could. My marriage was on the rocks, and never fully recovered, as we separated six years later.  I despaired of ever feeling “normal” again.  This was confirmed by my psychiatrist at the time who said I would be on antidepressants “indefinitely”, even though I had never needed antidepressants before!

Various conventional doctors (psychiatrists and GPs) at various times over those five years, prescribed the anti-depressants Prozac (which I refused to take) and Mirtazapine (which I took), the sleeping pill Zopiclone (which I also took) and the tranquilliser Temazepam (which I didn’t take). I was also offered antipsychotics and Imipramine.  While I did obtain temporary relief from panic, anxiety and insomnia with Mirtazapine, my depression seemed to worsen, and I felt completely hopeless, lethargic, and unhappy. Furthermore I found I was completely addicted to Mirtazapine, and when I tried to taper off it, my symptoms came back tenfold.

Meanwhile not a single one of these conventional doctors – not my GP, not any of the four psychiatrists I saw, not my ob-gyn nor two endocrinologists, suggested that I ever have my hormones (stress, thyroid and sex hormones) checked throughout either of my two – clearly hormonally driven — depressions. Nor did they suggest looking at my nutrition status, my gut, my toxic load or any of the key biochemical systems which I learned the hard way, regulate mood, stress and sleep. One particularly galling endocrinologist in France told me that there was no clear link between hormones and mood, and that women who became depressed at menopause were unhappy because their teenagers were leaving the nest! When challenged, she admitted that “we don’t understand the causes, so we treat the symptoms instead”.

During my gradual taper I had almost constant panic attacks and insomnia, could not deal with stress (positive — as in stimulation, or negative — as in anxiety) was constantly sad, had body dysmorphia (I thought I looked 100 years old, and maybe I did…), felt completely exhausted and was barely able to get out of bed. My psychiatrist refused to acknowledge that this could be due to withdrawal, and maintained that these were symptoms of the original depression (even though they felt very different, and much worse). I was on a tiny dose, which she also maintained could only be having a placebo effect. However an internet forum confirmed that hundreds of others were also suffering similar withdrawal symptoms, at similarly low doses.

I finally managed to stop my antidepressants over my 40th birthday, spent completely alone (I had sent my husband and boys away to spare them (and me) the agony of seeing me in this state and having to cope with anyone else’s needs but my own), battling rebound insomnia and panic attacks for two weeks. I thought I was out of the woods, but instead, for the next few months, I continued to be plagued by panic attacks and insomnia, exhaustion, and depression. It took me another two years to feel completely back to normal, and to be able to regulate my own nervous system, after having it artificially managed by the Mirtazapine. But it was hard work to get there.

It was only through working with integrative practitioners such as hormone specialists at the Marion Gluck clinic in London, Thierry Hertoghe in Belgium, and the obgyn Dr. Sara Gottfried in San Francisco (via webinars), nutritionists at Patrick Holford’s Brain Bio Centre in Richmond, and Akcelina at Ultimate Wellbeing in London, and eventually with the integrative GP Dr. Charles Forsyth, that I found out that I had adrenal fatigue and stress hormone imbalance, low sex hormones, low thyroid, leaky gut, nutritional and neurotransmitter imbalances, gluten intolerance, and a large heavy metal load. My conventional endocrinologist did also diagnose reactive hypoglycemia, however did not link it to my adrenal issues.

It was also through working with a wonderful cognitive behavioural therapist, Robin Hart, that I cured my panic attacks, and went from having several a day, to none in several years.  He taught me a simple breathing exercise, which changed my life.

Had I not had the resources — the education, time, and money — to devote to my healing, I might still be on antidepressants, and still have serious imbalances affecting my health, vitality and happiness. As it was, I was determined to heal, and spent several years seeing a plethora of integrative doctors and health practitioners, reading books, articles, and attending Webinars.  I weaned myself off sleeping pills and then anti depressants, and healed myself completely from my depression, anxiety and panic attacks, and reached a level of happiness and vitality that I had not known in years.

As people saw how I was able to turn my situation around and was able to optimize my wellbeing, friends started coming to me for advice, which I willingly gave. When I saw that they would often improve, as I had, by following an integrative approach to their mental health, I became determined to develop a website which could offer a short-cut for those suffering from mental health issues and their families so that they didn’t have to spend vast amounts of time, energy and money researching alternatives, reading books, and going from doctor to doctor.

MindHealth360 was born, and aims to provide access to a wealth of up to date, easy to access information and resources on integrative mental health for anyone suffering from, or trying to help someone suffering from, common mental health disorders.

Dedication

Depression runs in my family. My great aunt was institutionalised for post partum depression after the birth of her first child, and told she could never have more children.

My maternal grandmother was an alcoholic, and suffered from depression. She eventually committed suicide when my mother was 15. At the time, she was on experimental psychiatric drugs. Her loss has always cast a shadow on my family, and I would dearly have loved to have known her. Not only was she a victim of the burgeoning pharmacological approach to mental health in the US in the 1950s (as well as a rather repressive culture for women at that time, especially in the South), but had she known what I know now, and had she been able to access the large amount of new research on mental health to which we have access today, she would not have suffered such a tragic fate. Indeed the medical files I have seen for her show classic symptoms of peri-menopause (she was 49 when she died), and hormonal and blood sugar imbalances. This website is dedicated to her memory, and to all those who suffer disproportionately and often needlessly from mental health issues.

The post My integrative mental health journey appeared first on MindHealth360.