ABOUT SAFE HARBOR
Safe Harbor was founded in 1998 in the wake of growing public dissatisfaction with the unwanted effects of orthodox psychiatric treatments such as medication and shock therapy. Seeking to satisfy the desire for safer, more effective treatments, Safe Harbor is dedicated to educating the public, the medical profession, and government officials on research and treatments that, minimally, do no harm and, optimally, cure the causes of severe mental symptoms. Our primary thrust is education on the medical causes of severe mental symptoms and the use of nutritional and other natural treatments.
Contact info:
Safe Harbor
1718 Colorado Bl.
Los Angeles, California 90041
U.S.A.
(818) 890-1862
mail@alternativementalhealth.com
www.AlternativeMentalHealth.com
WE WELCOME YOUR DONATIONS. AS A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION, SAFE HARBOR IS SUPPORTED SOLELY THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF THE PUBLIC. DONATIONS CAN BE MAILED TO THE ABOVE ADDRESS. WE ALSO ACCEPT VISA/MASTERCARD BY PHONE. THANK YOU.
EDITOR’S COMMENT
Welcome to our 2nd anniversary issue of The Alternative Mental Health News! A lot has transpired since our humble beginnings. The articles have grown in length and complexity and we have scored a number of exclusives along the way. Particular credit should be given to Alan Graham who has written most of our ezine articles. Alan has a keen eye for good articles and his smooth writing is a pleasure to edit.
In year two we vow to make The AMH News even better. We have been heartened by the public’s hunger for safe alternative mental health treatments. We will do our best to continue to provide information that helps clinicians and the public alike alleviate or heal severe mental symptoms safely and naturally.
MARGOT KIDDER TO BE HONORED IN LOS ANGELES FOR MENTAL HEALTH WORK
In 1996 actress Margot Kidder of Superman fame made world headlines when the media placed a spotlight on her very public episode of nervous exhaustion in Los Angeles.
Rejecting offers of drugs for her problems, Ms. Kidder researched the causes behind her troubles and found she had hidden nutritional imbalances that no psychiatrist had ever looked for. After treating these nutritional issues, she started on her road to wellness.
Today Ms. Kidder has not only recovered without drugs and restored her career, but she has become the nation’s most vocal advocate for alternative mental health treatments as well as the international spokesperson for Safe Harbor.
On September 20, 2001, Margot Kidder, the Woman of Steel, makes a triumphant – and healthy – return to Los Angeles at the Hollywood Room of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel.
That evening, in recognition of her remarkable work, Safe Harbor will establish the Annual Margot Kidder Award. The Margot Kidder Award honors courageous men and women of goodwill who have advanced the use of safe, sensible, and effective alternative mental health treatments that heal the causes and symptoms of suffering, but do no harm. The first recipient will be Ms. Kidder herself.
This brilliant woman does what no other celebrity will do: She speaks with wit, eloquence and a disarming frankness about her views on the failure of psychiatric treatment and the bright future of alternative approaches.
Other speakers will include:
Dan Stradford, President and Founder of Safe Harbor, speaking on the achievements of Safe Harbor and the rapid growth of alternative mental health.
Dr. Hyla Cass, assistant professor of psychiatry at UCLA and one of the nation’s leading authors of books on nutritional and herbal treatment of mental disorders.
Jessica Martinez, from the L.A. County Dept of Mental Heath, telling her own story of how she now lives drug-free after 15 years of psychiatric medication.
Awards will also be presented to Safe Harbor’s top contributors.
Hors d’oeuvres will be served before the event amidst fine jazz music.
The tickets cost a very reasonable $60 before Sep. 1 and $75 after that.
Your donation will forward the work of Safe Harbor and AlternativeMentalHealth.com in educating the public, the medical field and government agencies on non-drug treatments for mental health problems.
Contact Safe Harbor at (818) 890 1862. We accept checks, Visa, and Master Charge. Checks can also be mailed to Safe Harbor, 1718 Colorado Bl., Los Angeles, CA 90041.
You can also buy tickets online at here. Simply note next to your name “Event” and the number of tickets you want. E.g. “Bill Jones, Event 2”
NUTRITIONAL BASIS OF HYPERACTIVITY EXPLORED
Lendon H. Smith earned his MD degree and began the practice of medicine almost 55 years ago and has fought for children’s health and nutrition issues for over three decades. Dr. Smith was among the first to educate Americans on the role of sugar, white flour, and junk food in hyperactivity, obesity, allergies, and many illnesses.
In his fourth year in medical school, Dr. Smith attended a lecture by a Portland pediatric neurologist who had been in charge of a home for “oddball” children in the 1930s. The neurologist told his nurse to give a dose of bromide to one of these patients, a girl characterized as wild and crazy. Given benzedrine by mistake, the girl fell asleep within about 30 minutes. The error was caught and reported, but they repeated the benzedrine dose experimentally the next day and the girl calmed down again. The doctor wrote a paper about this and it was reported in one of the pediatric journals. He noted that most of the kids he was seeing for this same syndrome had suffered some sort of birth trauma — cord around the neck, prematurity, collapsed lungs, or the like — which he characterized as “hurts to the nervous system.”
“He had no idea why a stimulant had this calming effect,” Dr. Lendon Smith explains. “We now know that it is because there is not enough norepinephrine in their limbic system, the part of the brain that is supposed to filter out unimportant stimuli. This serendipitous result of an accident has now allowed the psychiatrists and pediatricians to prescribe this type of narcotic drug to 4,000,000 kids on any given school day, and even pushed some of them into psychosis and homicide.
I was one of those drug-pushing pediatricians for a couple of decades.
“Then it became clear to me that there was a pattern to the behavior of these children. Genetics is there, of course, and can result in ‘hurts’ to the nervous system, but my patients were 80% boys. I found in examining them — trying to find some common denominator that I could use as a diagnostic criterion — that they were exquisitely ticklish.
They were unable to disregard unimportant stimuli. That is why they have trouble in the classroom with 30 other kids burping, coughing, passing gas and dropping pencils. The teacher says, ‘Charlie, sit down and stop moving around.’
“Blood tests were not helpful, but hair tests showed me that they were all low in calcium and especially magnesium. No wonder they craved chocolate. (There is more magnesium in chocolate than any other food on earth.) I began to treat them with oral doses of 500 mg magnesium and 1000 mg calcium daily. It took three weeks, but 80% of them were able to get off Ritalin or dextroamphetamine, or whatever stimulant they were on. As time went by, I had them take vitamin B6 if dream recall was poor and essential fatty acids if they had dry skin or a history of eczema. If they had ear infections as infants, they were taken off milk.
“I found it worked on adults if they had symptoms of ticklishness and inability to disregard unimportant stimuli. Apparently these people have some enzyme defect, genetic or nutritional, that prevented them from making norepinephrine, a stimulant, which we all now recognize is made to help the filtering device in the limbic system do its job. It is too bad that psychiatrists have failed to recognize that if a stimulant acts as a calming agent, then they must shore up the flagging enzyme that is under-producing. This all fits with the damage that we have done to the top soil [which is now deficient in] magnesium. The psychiatrists have made ADD/ADHD a disease, like pneumonia.”
Dr. Smith discovered that a variety of nutritional deficiencies and/or food sensitivities underlay the “hyperactivity” symptoms. The best results were obtained by recognizing these differences among patients and treating them accordingly.
“These patients were usually of wiry and/or athletic build; they were rarely obese. I did some blood and hair tests. All of them, yes, all of them, had a calcium and magnesium deficiency, despite the fact that many were drinking a quart of milk a day. Apparently they could not absorb the calcium from the dairy products because of their sensitivity. The intestines were rejecting it. It also explained why they loved the milk: somehow the body was telling them to drink it to get the calcium.”
[The source of this article is an exclusive interview published on the Optimal Wellness Center website, http://www.mercola.com.]DO SEROTONIN-ENHANCING DRUGS CHANGE BRAIN STRUCTURE?
Writer Gary Greenberg, reporting in the July 2001 issue of Discover Magazine (“The Serotonin Surprise”), revealed that about 30 million Americans — many of them not clinically depressed but rather among the “worried well” — have taken serotonin enhancers such as Prozac at one time or another. Quite apart from the violent impulses, agitation, and sexual dysfunction that have been documented as side effects, another concern among some clinicians is that after 15 years on the market, the precise reason these drugs counteract the symptoms of depression has never been isolated.
Greenberg reports that some scientists think they are on the verge of solving this mystery, suggesting that serotonin enhancers may work by encouraging the growth of new brain cells. At the same time, other researchers have found that high doses of these drugs cause changes in neurons that some would call brain damage — a finding that may have some bearing on the range of reported side effects.
Serotonin, also known as 5-Hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT, was first isolated in 1933, when it was discovered in the gut and called enteramine. In 1947 it was found in blood platelets and was renamed “serotonin” because it was found to constrict blood vessels. Soon after, serotonin was identified in the brain. But its role was unknown until researchers in found that three drugs — isoniazid and iproniazid, both antituberculars, and imipramine, an antihistamine — improved the moods of test subjects.
At around this time, the once-radical idea that nerve impulses in the brain are transmitted chemically was coming into vogue. The unanticipated psychoactive effects in the drug tests prompted scientists to study how these compounds affected chemical messengers in the brain called neurotransmitters. They found that all three agents acted on a group of neurotransmitters known as the monoamines. From this, they concluded that monoamines must be important in depression.
The clinical implications of this discovery were not lost on scientists at pharmaceutical companies, and in 1975 a group at Eli Lilly quietly reported that they had synthesized 110140, a substance that targeted serotonin with precision. Eleven years later, 110140 became Prozac, one of the most successful drugs ever brought to market, responsible in 1999 for 26 percent of the revenues of one of the largest companies in the United States.
Drugs like Prozac work by interfering with the metabolism of the brain. Serotonin travels from one neuron to another by crossing a gap known as a synapse. Normally, once the receiving neuron is activated, the chemical is reabsorbed by the brain.
But Prozac prevents this reabsorption, allowing serotonin to remain in the synapse and interact with its targets for much longer than it otherwise would.
Over the past few years, neuroscientist Elizabeth Gould’s research has shown that adult monkeys routinely grow new brain cells, a process known as neurogenesis. Neurogenesis seems most prevalent in the hippocampus — a region of the brain said to be involved in learning, memory, and perhaps emotion.
Gould and office neighbor Barry Jacobs, a professor of psychology at Princeton, discussed the implications and performed a relatively simple experiment, injecting rats with a drug that attaches to DNA in cells that are about to divide. The compound makes it possible to identify cells born after its injection. In the test, rats given Prozac reportedly generated 70 percent more neurons than the control subjects.
According to the Discover article, psychologists have found that stress floods the brain with glucocorticoids — hormones known to suppress neurogenesis or even kill neurons in the hippocampus. It takes about three to six weeks for new cells to mature — the same time it takes serotonin-enhancing drugs to make a difference in a patient.
Scientists at Yale’s Laboratory of Molecular Psychiatry, led by Jessica Malberg, have shown that both electroshock and serotonin-enhancing drugs increase neurogenesis in rats. While she cautions against identifying this cell growth with cancer, Malberg believes her findings should give people pause. “I think you have to accept that there is a structural change in your brain when you take drugs like Prozac. If people aren’t comfortable with that, that’s something else to consider.”
Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen, author of the book Prozac Backlash (published in 2000), finds these discoveries highly disturbing. Glenmullen believes the way the drugs are marketed suggests that depression is primarily a biological problem to be solved by biochemical means, instead of a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon that can be resolved in many cases without drugs. Glenmullen likens them to amphetamines and cocaine, both of which were once used widely, without fear of side effects, to give people more energy, improved mood, and increased focus.
SELENIUM HELPS COMBAT THYROID PROBLEMS, DEPRESSION
The role of dietary selenium in the maintenance of normal health has drawn considerable scientific attention recently. Selenium plays an important role in removing harmful free radicals from the body, thus helping to shield it from many chronic diseases, such as atherosclerosis, heart disease and cancer. Several types of cancer have been shown to be much more common in those with low selenium intake.
More recently selenium has been found to be essential to the activation of the thyroid hormones, have a number of benefits to the immune system, and affect male fertility. The list is growing fast.
Intensively farmed soils tend to be selenium deficient. Amounts we consume from grains have fallen dramatically in the last 15 years and vegetarians are at particular risk of being deficient.
The osteopathic clinic headed by Alan P. Smith administered a selenium supplement to a test group over a 6 week period and adjusted for placebo effect. This was done in conjunction with Sheffield Hallam University’s hair analysis research on trace element levels, and followed up with a questionnaire to determine the selenium’s impact on health and mood levels.
Initial hair levels did not suggest any overt deficiency, but of 24 subjects who completed the study there were significant improvements in the areas of muscle and joint problems, thyroid function, depression and anxiety, along with a 20% increase in hair selenium levels.
This supports previous observations that there is sub-clinical deficiency of selenium in this country and that supplementation can effect improvements in general health as well as offer protection against chronic disease.
Hypothyroidism is a known factor in depression, as we reported in our August 2000 issue. The importance of properly functioning thyroid glands to mood and general well-being is widely acknowledged in the scientific community.
Findings reported at the recent 83rd Annual Meeting of the Endocrine Society have isolated selenium as a key component of immune system enzymes that help protect the thyroid and ensure its proper functioning.
The findings, presented by physician Barbara Gasnier of the Medizinische Klinik University, Munich, suggest that supplementing with selenium may help to slow down the progression of autoimmune thyroid disease, as well as helping to combat thyroiditis at its onset.
The study looked at 72 women at an average age of 42, all of whom had autoimmune thyroiditis (thyroid inflammation from the body’s “allergy” to its own thyroid). Half the patients received selenium supplementation for three months; the other half received a placebo. Antibody levels returned completely to normal in nine members of the selenium group, as compared to just two in the control group. TPO (thyroid peroxidase) antibody levels decreased significantly in the selenium group, with the patients having the greatest TPO level at the outset of the study experiencing the most improvement.
ADDICTIVENESS OF ANTIDEPRESSANTS PROBED
Addiction to the very drugs designed to stop depression may be sending sufferers into the depths of despair, according to Sarah Boseley, health reporter for The Guardian, a British newspaper.
Thousands of people in Britain and around the world could be physically addicted to the antidepressant drug paroxetine (marketed in Britain as Seroxat, in the US as Paxil, and in Australia under the name Aropax), reports David Healy, director of the North Wales department of psychological medicine and Britain’s foremost expert in antidepressants.
Given access to the archives of the drug’s manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline, Healy found reports that healthy volunteers given the drug for a trial period in the 1980s suffered withdrawal symptoms when they stopped taking the drug after just a few weeks.
Yet the company has failed to warn patients or doctors, he says, and it has argued that people suffering problems when they stop taking the drug are suffering a recurrence of depression and need to go back on medication.
In recent months, a jury in the United States ordered GlaxoSmithKline to pay $12.2million to the family of Donald Schell, 60, who killed his wife, daughter, granddaughter and himself after two days on Seroxat. This followed the Australian case two weeks earlier when a judge ruled that another drug in the class, sertraline (Zoloft), caused David Hawkins to murder his wife and try to kill himself.
Healy says that one study showed that as many as 85 per cent of the volunteers – who were healthy company employees – suffered agitation, abnormal dreams, insomnia and other adverse effects. On average about half the volunteers taking part in a group of studies specifically designed to detect withdrawal manifested symptoms of physical dependency.
Healy believes all the drugs of the SSRI (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor) class, such as Prozac and Paxil, can cause physical dependency in some people. “All the major SSRIs cause withdrawal problems although paroxetine may be worse than the others,” he said. “In the case of some this isn’t an infrequent occurrence. More than 50 per cent of people may have significant withdrawal problems that they should be warned about. This is way beyond what was happening with the older drugs.”
One of the main selling points of the SSRIs when they arrived in the early ’90s was that people did not become physically dependent on them as they had on older antidepressants such as Valium and Librium.
But a World Health Organization table of the drugs that doctors think cause people most withdrawal problems puts paroxetine (Seroxat) in the number one slot with twice as many reports as the next highest, an SSRI called venlafaxine (Efexor).
Sertraline (Lustral) is fourth and fluoxetine (Prozac) is seventh in the table compiled by Sweden’s Uppsala monitoring centre. Benzodiazepines Ativan (lorazepam) and Valium (diazepam) are 11th and 13th.
“The SSRIs are drugs for which withdrawal symptoms are most reported worldwide,” said Charles Medar of the group Social Audit, which has battled to get the authorities to acknowledge the problem.
The firms maintain that people who feel worse after stopping the drugs are suffering recurring depression, and recommend going back on the drugs. But Healy says any immediate return of symptoms is probably withdrawal and that if it were another bout of depression, it would be unlikely to show up for up to a year. Some people, he says, have been on the SSRIs for as long as five years because each time they stop they feel worse.
“The drugs are not being given to people who are severely ill,” he said. “These are people who are miserable, with lower-grade mood disorders. They are people who should not be on these drugs for this length of time.”
He was given access to the papers in GlaxoSmithKline’s archives after legal representations before the Schell trial, in which he was a witness. Tim Tobin, Schell’s son-in-law, whose wife and only child died, had sued GlaxoSmithKline. The jury agreed that Schell had suffered a violent reaction to Paxil/Seroxat.
VITAMIN RELIEF: SUPPLEMENTS FOR SCHOOL KIDS
The Healthy Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Murrieta, CA, has launched a program to donate nutritional supplements to underpriviledged and at-risk children.
As reported in previous issues of The Alternative Mental Health News, studies have shown that academic performance improves and behavior problems diminish significantly when children are given nutritional supplements. Our November 2000 issue (No. 5) reported on an Arizona study that showed a 47% drop in disciplinary problems among children given supplements.
“We are currently supplying supplements to 6000 children daily,” said Hyla Cass, M.D., president of the organization. “We want to make that a million children a day nationwide. By enhancing their nutritional status, we can make a huge difference in their lives, to their future, and to society.”
Dr. Cass is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine, Chairman of the Department of Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the American University of Complementary Medicine as well as the noted author of the books St.John’s Wort: Nature’s Blues Buster, Kava: Nature’s Answer to Stress, Anxiety and Insomnia, All About St. John’s Wort and All About Herbs.
The Healthy Foundation also has a program for providing supplements to the homeless. They need funds to carry this out, and any donations will be greatly appreciated.
For more information, their site is at http://www.vitaminrelief.org and their phone number is (909) 696 -0552.
ABOUT AlternativeMentalHealth.com
ALTERNATIVEMENTALHEALTH.COM IS THE WORLD’S LARGEST WEB SITE DEVOTED exclusively to alternative mental health treatments. It includes a directory of 200 physicians, nutritionists, experts, organizations, and facilities around the U.S. that offer or promote safe, alternative treatments for severe mental symptoms. Many of the physicians listed do in-depth examinations to find the physical causes behind mental problems.
Also included on the site are an array of articles on topics ranging from the medical causes of schizophrenia to the effects of toxic metals on mental health.
A bookstore page lists top books that cover many areas of alternative treatments with titles like Natural Healing for Schizophrenia and Other Common Mental Disorders and No More Ritalin.
AlternativeMentalHealth.com has been created to educate the public, practitioners, and government officials on the medical conditions that create “mental illness” and the many safe resources available for addressing and often curing severe mental symptoms.