Chapter Sixteen

What Can Be Done if You Have
Never Taken Psychiatric Medications?

If you are suffering from anxiety, stress that does not seem to end, fatigue or a host of symptoms, you absolutely have an alternative to psychiatric medication.

First: Get a complete physical and have the physician rule out all disease or illness.

There can be life events that were the direct cause of depression, anxiety, stress, fatigue and more. Usually, these feelings go away on their own in a matter of days or weeks without you doing anything other than letting some time pass.

These medications are strong, some are truly addicting, and all of the drugs are life altering. The question is how your life will be altered.

When depression, anxiety, stress, and/or fatigue begin, other factors also play a role in general health. Levels of hormones, adrenals, glucose, cortisol and other functions can become drained, imbalanced or overly stimulated. Psychoactive medications, in part, are designed to regulate all of these functions to some degree, but they ultimately affect these functions by altering other chemicals in the brain and body.

Second: If you are diagnosed with a disease or illness, make sure the diagnosis is from an objective test – not a subjective analysis. As of this writing, all mental disorders are diagnosed with subjective tests.

Later in this chapter you will find possible solutions for symptoms you may be experiencing. One example is using the Body Calm, Body CalmSupreme and Essential Protein Formula for anxiety symptoms. These supplements do not cure disease or illness. With that in mind, if you feel the anxiety vanish once you begin using these supplements, you must not have had an Anxiety Disorder.

If you were diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, take the Power Barley Formula and vitamin E, and no longer feel the fatigue, you were misdiagnosed. Misdiagnoses can and do happen.

If a diagnosis of ADHD is presented, then you take Omega 3 Supreme, vitamin E, and possibly Body Calm and your symptoms subside, you did not have ADHD. Again, these supplements do not cure or prevent disease or illness. If you feel the major positive changes after using these supplements, your body was just lacking those nutrients.

Good-meaning, well-intentioned physicians often feel like they must prescribe psychoactive medication or face the threat of malpractice. One senior partner in a law firm refused to even read this book. Why? His answer was, “If there is a way to taper off psychiatric drugs, with little to no side effects, we would no longer have a case.”

If you receive a clean bill of health from your physician, there are suggestions and probable solutions.

Anxiety Stress, Fatigue, and Depression – Anxiety, stress, fatigue and depression quickly wear the body down. In no time the body begins to feel drained and rundown. One can easily lose track of where the anxiety, stress, fatigue or depression started, and when the body seemed to lump together with your overall feeling.

The goal of The Road Back is to assist you in keeping you separated from the anxiety, stress, fatigue and depression from the body.

As an example, take a finger on your hand.

You can unintentionally hit your finger with a hammer. Your hurt finger will have an effect on you until it heals. You can also decide to hit your finger with a hammer and have an effect on your body.

In either case, if the finger were hit hard enough, you and the injured body part would begin to lump together and you would begin to feel like you were only the body. Or your attention would become so fixed on the body that it would be difficult to distinguish the two. Your entire attention becoming fixated on the hurt finger.

Ask an artist to hit his/her finger with a hammer very hard and to then paint a beautiful picture or create anything not associated with pain. It will not happen. The live, creating part of us, the part that feels emotion – both wanted or unwanted emotion – begins to collapse with the body. 

There is not a drug made that can prevent a person from hitting his or her finger with a hammer.

If you have just lost a loved one, or on a lesser scale, just lost your job, there are no supplements or medications that will replace the loss.

The most a psychoactive medication will do is deaden the feelings experienced because of the loss. The most a good supplement will do is assist the body to not succumb to the continued drain put on it because of the feeling of loss.

The Road Back has zero chance of coming into your life and handling the life reason for anxiety, stress, depression or even fatigue. However, we can assist your body to not succumb to the physical stressors being put on it daily from emotional trauma.

Hundreds of clinical trials have shown that people with anxiety; stress, fatigue and depression have low levels of amino acids, vitamins, minerals, antioxidant levels and more. These clinical trials point to the fact that a person will suffer a depletion of these vital nutrients if they are put under enough stress or duress for a period of time.

Our goal here is to point out a few things you can do to help your body maintain general health and well-being while you address the real reason for the problem you are experiencing.

When using the terms anxiety, stress, depression and fatigue, we do not imply a disease or illness associated with these conditions.

If you are trying to choose between two different jobs or changing jobs and feel anxiety and stress, that anxiety or stress is not a disease. After choosing one or the other, the anxiety or stress would vanish. If you just experienced a loss in life, that loss is not a disease. That is part of what eventually happens to each living person. Natural emotions are not diseases or illnesses. You should be considered very sane and normal.

If an emotion continues beyond some arbitrary “they should be over it by now” time period, psychoactive medication comes into play. Neither these drugs nor supplements will help you “realize” or have an “earth shattering realization” about why you have felt that way for such a long time or remove the loss you feel. They will not.

Psychoactive medication may block the emotion, but the emotion will need to be dealt with at some time in the future, unless you just wish to feel “flat-lined” forever. Most people tell us, in hindsight, they would have been better off dealing with the emotion when it happened, instead of putting it off for months or years and then dealing with the emotion on top of the drug withdrawal.

This is why The Road Back suggests using a few supplements. Again, the supplements are not going to solve the problem or underlying condition. They will only help maintain the body’s general health and well-being and give you the chance to address the original problem.

We break down symptoms into two areas; anxiety/stress/insomnia, or fatigue. You may feel that you have depression, but even the depression will fit in to one of these two categories.

For Anxiety/Stress/Insomnia: Go to the chapter General Pre-Tapering and Tapering Instructions and read the entire chapter. Then go to the chapter Pre-Taper for Benzodiazepines, Anti-anxiety, Anticonvulsant and Sleep Medication and follow the pre-taper instructions.

Use the Daily Journal and complete the entire pre-taper. This should handle all anxiety, stress and /or insomnia, if present. You can use these supplements as long as you wish; they are not addictive or habit forming.

For Fatigue: Read the entire chapter General Pre-Tapering and Tapering Instructions. Then go to the chapter Pre-Taper for Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and ADHD Medication and follow the pre-taper instructions in the section, If You Have Fatigue.

Other Options

There are several excellent products available you can take to get you and your body back in shape again. An example of these products can be found at http://www.theradiantgreens.com. Their Radiant Greens Natural is one of my favorites. Find yourself a good doctor to work with. Maybe a chiropractor or naturopath, who understands nutrition a little more than a medical doctor, is in order.