Vitamins work, but sometimes not enough

I got to thinking about the role of vitamins in recovery early this morning (4 a.m.) when I suddenly woke up from a deep sleep. That’s funny, I thought. I haven’t even had a drop of alcohol, I went to yoga; so why am I waking up? Then blinding insight struck. Waking up must have been to bring my perspective to Marian’s and Duane’s recent exchange of comments on the chicken and egg subject “is it mental or is it physical?” Yes, that was it!

I probably have got some of their points wrong, so please read the comment string at the bottom of the post. Marian, Duane and I agree more than disagree about the importance of vitamins for good mental health. For Duane, recovery seems more about the vitamins correcting underlying health conditions that can lead to psychosis. For Marian, it’s more about healing the trauma that produced the symptoms. Marian feels more strongly than Duane that original trauma lies at the heart of an eventual schizophrenia diagnosis. Duane has experienced success when supplements were administered to his teenage son, so naturally, he sees the value of this strategy. Duane’s not alone, because there are thousands of people who have credited their recovery to orthomolecular therapy. I have seen instant turn-around in myself when I use vitamins for specific health problems.

Actress Margo Kidder, recovered from bipolar disorder, always says that the first thing you need to do is get a hair test. I took her advice for my youngest son, Taylor, who was beginning to worry me back in high school. This was after Chris got his “diagnosis.” Taylor’s rebound was phenomenal and you can read about it here.  I only wish I had known about hair tests and orthomolecular therapy before Chris fell into the mental health maze. Based on what I observed with Taylor, it is very possible that Chris would have recovered quickly if I had got to him around the age of sixteen when he first began showing symptoms. (Severe acne may be one of the symptoms, according to Dr. Hoffer, as sufferers from pellagra, a vitamin B deficiency, have the same skin problems.)

You don’t have to be as young as sixteen to experience turn-around on vitamins alone, but then there are the people, like Chris, and like many others, who have become psychotic, and that’s where I think it gets tricky. It is possible that once someone experiences psychosis, recovery on vitamins alone is more problematic, not because it can’t happen, but because it takes longer, or perhaps because the person begins to “enjoy” certain aspects of the psychosis and/or starts to question every aspect of existence. If you experience a spiritual awakening, also known as a kundalini crisis, once the djinii is out of the bottle, it gets harder to put it back in. The crisis begins to take on a life of its own. Kundalini crises don’t resolve overnight.

The problem is, and always will be, the meds. It becomes very hard to untangle what is actually going on once meds enter the picture. I have no doubt that many more people would recover quicker than they do if megavitamins and dietary changes were introduced at the outset instead of the meds. Many more people would also recover quicker if they encountered the right kind of therapy or found the right person who said the right thing at the right time.

That’s why I don’t play up the role of vitamins as much in my blog as much as some readers would wish. Much of the impetus for my blog comes from wanting to show people that the “harder” cases, the so-called chronic or “treatment resistant” cases are often the people where it just means you have to work harder to get at the roots of the problem. I have seen my son improve when vitamins were introduced on top of the meds, I’ve seen him do very well when he was off the meds and on vitamins alone, and I’ve seen him relapse after doing very well on vitamins alone. Some people have recovered never having been introduced to vitamins at all.

The hair test

Unlike most psychiatrists who will judge you insane just by looking at you, Dr. Gregory House is perhaps too willing to run tests on his patients. Overlooking the fact that he is the fictional MD star of the eponymously named hit television series, I don’t want House anywhere near my son. Dr. House will run a battery of invasive tests, drill into your skull and perhaps harvest your spleen before he finally figures out what your real problem is. No thank you! There are better, less invasive ways of getting a snapshot of your underlying health problems.

An alternative to muscle testing is hair tissue analysis. Hair tissue analysis is known to the general public in the context of forensic science, but what is not so well known is that it is often used for people with mental illness and other health concerns to discover and correct underlying problems in metabolic rate, energy levels, sugar and carbohydrate tolerance, stage of stress, immune system, and glandular activity. Tests can be ordered through your family physician.

Hair tissue mineral analysis is a relatively cheap, accurate method of testing for the presence of minerals and toxic metals that can be symptomatic of body chemistry imbalances. For example, excess quantities of copper found in the body are associated with various health concerns, from fatigue and anorexia to depression and schizophrenia. Persons with too much copper in their system might tend to be creative, dreamy, and inattentive. A test involves simply snipping a small amount of hair near the base of the scalp and sending it in the mail to a laboratory such as Analytical Research Labs in Phoenix, Arizona, or the Great Plains Laboratory in Lenexa, Kansas. These laboratories analyze the hair sample and send back a printout of the test results, along with a recommended diet plan and protocol of supplements to address the revealed deficiencies and imbalances.

My youngest son, Taylor, was a bright but dreamy and woefully underachieving student throughout his entire elementary and high school studies, right up until I got him a hair test. His test results showed that he was off the charts in terms of his high copper levels. Excess copper made him an excellent artist but a poor academic performer. He had trouble focusing and with attempting to solve complex problems. He all too often just gave up. The turn-around in him in the second half of his penultimate year in high school was astonishing. He graduated in the top 10% of his high school class, and has kept up the pace in his first year of college. Many people would say this pattern is typical of boys, who often pull up their socks academically in their last year of high school. I strongly believe (but cannot prove) that Taylor would not have done so well without the increased focus that the vitamin support provided.