Safe Alternatives to Antidepressants

Safe alternatives to Antidepressants

Doctors have diagnosed more people with mental disorders, which require medications, in the past decade in order to gain control with the major pharmaceutical companies that have influence in the medical world when there are plenty of natural, safe alternatives. Psychiatric drugs are now used not only used extensively in our schools, nursing homes, drug rehabilitation centers and prisons, individuals personally rely on them to “help” them with everything from weight control, self confidence, mathematical and writing problems, to anxiety, sleeping and upsets. In fact, they have become the relief for the stresses of modern living. (Psychiatric Drugs Cont.) Natural ways to heal depression include Neuro-feedback, where a computer helps you re-train your brain waves (Guyol, 153), Meditation, and herbal healing.

While billions in tax dollars are paid each year to fight the “war on drugs,” we have a different kind of drug war affecting the world today, one that is perpetuated by psychiatrists dreaming up new mental illnesses to fund a multibillion-dollar legal drug industry. (Psychiatric Drugs Cont.) The American Psychiatric Associations’ Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is psychiatry’s “billing bible” of so-called mental disorders. With the DSM, psychiatry has taken “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” to them. While even key DSM contributors admit, there is no scientific/medical validity to the “disorders.” (Psychiatry’s “Diagnostic” System) With this type of system, anyone can be labeled mentally ill and be subjected to life threatening medications basely on some doctor’s opinion. Just in the United States, more than six billion children are taking mind-altering psychiatric drugs for the learning and behavioral “disorder,” ADHD. Two million children take antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs. (Psychiatric Drugs Cont.) Jim Gottstein states, “The high rate at which we are drugging American’s children with psycho-tropics is a national disgrace.” (Teen Screen)

Psychiatrists claim that a person “needs” a drug to combat their “chemical imbalance” in the brain, which is causing the person’s “mental disorder.” This concept that a brain-based chemical imbalance underlies mental illness is false. While popularized by heavy public marketing, it is simply psychiatric wishful thinking. As with all of psychiatry’s disease models, it has been thoroughly discredited by researchers. In 1996, psychiatrist David Kaiser said,”…modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly probe the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness…Patients have been diagnosed with �chemical imbalances’ despite the fact that no tests exists to support such a claim, and…there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.” Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D., author of Blaming the Brain, says, “There are no tests available for assessing the chemical status f a living person’s brain. No biochemical, anatomical, or functional signs have been found that reliably distinguish the brains of mental patients. The theories are held on to not only because there is nothing else to take their place, but also because they are useful in promoting drug treatment.” (The “Chemical Imbalance” Hoax)

Neuro-feedback is like stated before, the regaining control of your brain waves. The patient sits in front of a computer that reads a patient’s brain waves and then based on “normal” person’s brain waves the computer sends out frequencies to fix the differences. Neuro-feedback is recommended as an alternative treatment for the psychiatric disorders ADHA, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, phobias, obsessive-compulsive and bipolar disorders, and depression. (Guyol, 154-156)

Meditation is concentration that quiets the active mind by focusing it on a singular thing in order to elicit a state of peace. Herbert Benson, M.D., founder of Harvard’s Mind/Body Medical Institute, documented how meditation stimulates certain areas of the hypothalamus, affecting breathing rate, oxygen consumption, blood flow, and brain-wave rhythm (Cefrey, 182) which all can be related back to mental state