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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So many people want to feel better than they do. They go to doctors who will give them pills to end their pain, psychotherapists who will only tell them what they want to hear, and bars where they can pretend to be anyone but themselves.

We want to feel better and we have a right to. So often, unfortunately, our unwillingness to experience ANY discomfort keeps us from getting the real relief we need.

One woman who came to me because of horrifying flashbacks and night terrors she'd endured since she'd been raped as a teenager, had suffered long and hard. The pain was in her face. One of the first things she said when she came in was, "I just want it to go away."  Shortly thereafter she asked, "Do you think it'll take more than a few sessions?"

The goal is relief, but sometimes the road there demands that we feel the things we have spent so much time and energy denying.

Asthma is a perfect example of how we work and how the confrontation is ultimately inevitable if we want to heal. There was one study done in which patients journaled about their worst experiences. They did this every day for 20 minutes for a period of weeks. The result–a statistically significant reduction in their use of inhalers. Asthma is just one of many syndromes that are driven by emotion, particularly suppressed emotions such as anger, anxiety, and grief. In order for it to be healed or even mitigated, those emotions must be released appropriately even if they are uncomfortable or unpleasant.

A long time ago a colleague told me, "The more you resist, the more it persists." She was right.

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