A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives

by Kelly Brogan

Depression is merely a symptom, a sign that something is off balance or ill in the body that needs to be remedied.

One in four women in their forties and fifties use psychiatric drugs.)

The dirtiest little secret of all is the fact that antidepressants are among the most difficult drugs to taper from, more so than alcohol and opiates. While you might call it “going through withdrawal,” we medical professionals have been

While I acknowledge my patient’s past experiences, I also focus on what’s unfolding today from a cellular standpoint and the potential impairment (“dysregulation”) of her immune system. The

All of my patients share similar goals: they want to feel physically vibrant and emotionally balanced, which I believe is everyone’s birthright—not perpetually drained, unsettled, mentally foggy, and unable to enjoy life.

I will prove that depression is often a result of chronic inflammation—simple

I also will explain the underlying responsibilities of your immune system in orchestrating all matters of mental health.

Humans have used mind-altering substances to try to dull and deaden pain, misery, sorrow, and suffering since time immemorial, but only in the last few decades have people been persuaded that depression is a disease and that chemical antidepressants are the remedy.

Pharmaceutical products as we know them have not been developed or studied with modern science’s most relevant principles in mind, such as the complexity and power of the human microbiome, the

Your body’s symptoms are telling you something about equilibrium. Your body is trying to tell you that it has lost balance. Stand back and appreciate the infinite complexity of your organism. Know that fear will only drive you to treat your body like a robotic machine that needs oil and gear changes.

As one of my favorite quotes goes: “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”

“Many individuals who are prescribed and use antidepressant medications may not have met criteria for mental disorders. Our data indicate that antidepressants are commonly used in the absence of clear evidence-based indications.”15

By mid-century no one was looking into how intestinal health could affect mental health. Instead, the thinking was quickly becoming the reverse—that depression and anxiety influenced the gut.

The gut was regarded as the seat of health in ancient medical practices for centuries; now we can finally appreciate the validity of such old wisdom. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who lived in the third century BCE, was among the first to say that “all disease begins in the gut.”

Higher levels of inflammatory markers, which often indicate that the body’s immune system is on high alert, significantly increase the risk of developing depression. And these levels parallel the depth of the depression: higher levels equates with more severe depression.

And it’s no surprise, at least to me, that depression is far more common in people with other inflammatory and autoimmune issues like irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, insulin resistance, and obesity.

Contrary to what you might assume, one of the most influential risk factors for depression is high blood sugar.

In their paper they highlight the value of what I practice: psychoneuroimmunology.23 Indeed, it’s

complex interplay between various systems and organs of the body, especially those that syncopate the nervous, gastrointestinal, and immune systems in a brilliant dance that in turn affects mental well-being.

These patients show elevated levels of inflammatory markers in their blood, signs that their body is on the defensive, activating processes that can result in unexplainable physical symptoms and that are diagnosed

These diagnoses have a lot in common in terms of symptoms: fatigue, sensitivity to pain, inability to concentrate, flu-like malaise, and cognitive issues. Isn’t

It turns out that it may not all be in your head—but rather in the interconnectedness among the gut, immune, and endocrine systems.

As you read this, some 100 trillion microbes are colonized in your intestines alone.26 They outnumber your own cells by a factor of about ten, covering your insides and outsides. And they contain estimates of more than 8 million genes of their own, which means that fully 99 percent of the genetic material in your body is not your own. It belongs to your microbial comrades.

In other words, genes from microbes have inserted themselves into our genetic code (mitochondrial DNA being the prime example) to help us evolve and flourish.

In the future we’ll likely see how the other microbes contribute at least as much to our health as bacteria do. The microbiome is so crucial to human health that it could be considered an organ in and of itself. In fact, it

Put simply, your microbiome influences practically everything about your health, including how you feel both emotionally, physically, and mentally.

What compromises a healthy microbiome? Not surprisingly, your microbiome is vulnerable to three antagonizing forces: exposure to substances that kill or otherwise negatively change the composition of the bacterial colonies (these substances include everything from environmental chemicals and drugs like antibiotics to ingredients such as artificial sugars and processed gluten-containing foods); a lack of nutrients that support healthy, diverse tribes of good microbes; and unrelenting stress.

We have coevolved with these microorganisms throughout our journey on this planet, and we must respect them for what they are: the body’s—and brain’s—best friend. And they are as much a part of our survival and mental well-being as our own cells are.

The key players of the stress response, cortisol and epinephrine (adrenaline), have both protective and adverse effects on the body depending on when and how much they are used. On one hand, these hormones are essential for the body’s ability to adapt and maintain balance (homeostasis), but if they are flowing for a prolonged

period or needed relatively frequently, they can accelerate disease processes. The allostatic load, as it’s called, becomes more harmful than helpful.

The moment you feel nervous, anxious, extremely overwhelmed, or simply worried that you can’t deal with life, the hypothalamus releases a corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), a substance that starts a cascade of reactions, ending with cortisol flowing into your bloodstream.

You’re probably already familiar with cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone that aids in that famous fight-or-flight response. It also controls how your body processes carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.

For this reason, continual exposure to excess cortisol over time can lead to increased abdominal fat, bone loss, a suppressed immune system, fatigue, and a heightened risk for insulin resistance, diabetes,

DEPRESSION ISN’T GENETIC, IT’S EPIGENETIC

And it’s now well established that our health outcomes are dominated more by our environment than our inheritance. As I like to remind my patients, depression is epigenetic, not genetic.

Epigenetics, defined more technically, is the study of sections of your DNA (called “marks,” or “markers”) that essentially tell your genes when and how strongly to express themselves. Like

The best way to heal our brains is to heal the bodies in which they reside. Or, as I also like to put it, free your mind by healing your whole body.

Truth Serum: Coming Clean About the Serotonin Myth How You’ve Been Misled, Misdiagnosed, and Mistreated

1 Believe it or not, we are spending more on antidepressants than the gross national product of more than half of the world’s countries.

Sixty percent of people on antidepressants stay on them for more than two years, and 14 percent do so for more than a decade.

The medical industry isn’t selling a cure. They are selling sickness.

by increasing the availability of serotonin, a neurotransmitter famously associated with mood, in the gaps between cells of the brain. In

That’s right: there has never been a human study that successfully links low serotonin levels and depression.

In other words, the serotonin theory of depression is a total myth that has been unjustly supported by the manipulation of data. Much to the contrary, high serotonin levels have been linked to a range of problems, including schizophrenia and autism.19

Andrews brings up a good point in a recent review: we can’t measure serotonin in a living human brain yet, so it’s impossible to know exactly how the brain is releasing and using serotonin. What scientists must

To date, the best available evidence indicates that more serotonin—not less—is released and used during depressive episodes. This natural surge of serotonin helps the brain adapt to depression; it forces the body to spend more energy on conscious thought than to areas such as growth, development, reproduction, immune function, and the stress response.21

The drugs are interfering with the brain’s own mechanisms of recovery. This is an important point, because time and time again people ask me how antidepressants appear to be helpful in the short term. Perhaps, in the rare instance that their effects are adaptive, it is by virtue of the brain’s own powers trying to combat the assault of the antidepressants—not the other way around. But over

2008, the researchers write: “. . . numerous studies of norepinephrine and serotonin metabolites in plasma, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid as well as postmortem studies of the brains of patients with depression, have yet to identify the purported deficiency reliably.”23

Indeed, the brain orchestrates a delicate interplay among some one hundred neurotransmitters, including fourteen different types of serotonin receptors. To think we can cherry-pick one brain chemical and cure all and every behavioral disturbance is a gross oversimplification and downright absurd.

Dr. Carlat speaks the truth in his own words: “And where there is a scientific vacuum, drug companies are happy to insert a marketing message and call it science. As a result, psychiatry has become a proving ground for outrageous manipulations of science in the service of profit.”29