Words are Medicine

I know a young woman who has had symptoms of anxiety for many years and the allopathic doctors she has seen  diagnosed her as depressed. But as her latest incident demonstrates, these broad terms–anxiety, depression–do us very little good if we are to truly help someone heal. What they do–and the reason why doctors continue to use them as sweepingly as they do–is they are convenient forms of shorthand that directly point to pharmaceutical interventions. They do not, however, tell us anything about the nature of the anxiety, the way it manifests, what about the person and their health (or lack thereof) to which it is both pointing and from which it is springing. If those terms are all we use, we can get ourselves into serious trouble.

She was seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist who both agreed her anxiety was a symptom of her depression. So, even though she's an adolescent, she was put on Lexapro. Within 28 days her symptoms of anxiety spiraled into massive agitation, self-mutilation, delusions, and auditory hallucinations.  She was placed in an allopathic hospital.

What did they do?

They doubled her dosage. So now she was clawing at herself with her own fingernails and threatening to kill herself.

What was the next step?

Leave her on the Lexapro and give her thorazine as a chaser.

Her symptoms have not only not abated, they have worsened and become life-threatening.

This is not the first time I have heard or seen a patient unravel this way because of allopathic dosing. It is frightening in and of itself, but it is much worse when the parent is pleading with the doctors to take her child off the medication that has clearly exacerbated the situation and they will not listen. To make matters even more desperate, if the mother were to take the child out of the hospital and bring her to a healer of her own choice, in their state she could be incarcerated.

Thankfully for this Albuquerque psychotherapist, New Mexico has passed the Healthcare Freedom of Choice Act, which allows individuals to choose their own medical care, whether they follow the advice of their tribal shaman or choose to use the chemotherapies of western medicine.

Happily, the young lady's story doesn't end there. The mother, armed with the literature that demonstrates how ill-advised it is to use an SSRI on an adolescent female, has finally gotten one reasonable physician to agree with her and, while titrating her off the Lexapro, substituting it with Resperdal, an anti-psychotic.

When she is stabilized from this episode, they will be seeking out homeopathic treatment in their area, where finally she will be heard.

And what they might find out is that what they were calling "depression" may not have been  a standard depression at all, but either a borderline personality disorder or a prodromal psychotic state with agitation and some delusions (or perhaps both). In such cases it is highly INadvisable to give SSRI's, which tend  to do exactly what they did to this young woman.

When your doctors don't listen to you, be sure you listen to yourself.

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