Whole-Body Psychiatry: Nutrition for Mental Health

Treating the Whole Person

Curing patients with vitamins, as Hedaya did with the woman suffering panic attacks, is not new. In fact, this approach was the breakthrough treatment in mental health in the 1950s. Canadian physician and medical researcher Abram Hoffer began treating people with schizophrenia using niacin, or vitamin B3, and claimed a cure rate of 75 percent — meaning, he said, that these people were well enough to go back to work and pay taxes instead of needing to be supported by society. In 1968, Nobel Prize–winning scientist Linus Pauling — the great champion of megadose vitamin C — coined the term “orthomolecular,” which means “the right molecule,” to describe this method of treatment.
The ’50s also saw the introduction of the prescription drug Haldol and other such medications, and they were widely embraced by the medical profession over the years. But recently, there has been growing frustration with drug therapy among doctors as well as patients — the cure rate is abysmal and the side effects so vicious that even patients who feel better don’t want to continue the regimen.
According to Steven Carter, director of the International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine, those who advocate for high-dose vitamin treatments, as opposed to drug therapy, use nutrients that occur naturally in the body. And there are 40 essential nutrients that need to be balanced according to someone’s individual biochemistry.
“Medications can be quick,” says Jonathan Prousky, ND, MSc, editor of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. “They will quickly subdue someone and make them docile, which makes people think they’re getting better. But they’re not getting better. I’ve never met a patient on an antipsychotic medication who was living a thriving, flourishing life. I’ve never seen it.”
There is a relative scarcity of research into the healing properties of vitamins and nutrition, because, frankly, there’s little profit to be made from these discoveries — unlike the money flowing from new FDA-approved drugs. Even worse, there is not enough awareness of the existing research, says Jeffrey Becker, MD, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and practitioner of functional medicine who specializes in schizophrenia.
Still, Becker and others are gathering this research and crafting multilayered treatment strategies that are proving effective even with schizophrenia, one of the most intractable and complex of mental illnesses. “With schizophrenia, it’s as if the dream world is penetrating your everyday consciousness,” he says. “All of us have the capacity to ‘hear voices’ — we do it in our dreams. In this disorder, it happens when it shouldn’t.”
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