What Help from Hormones, Vitamins and Minerals?

CAN there be a connection between one’s diet and mental and emotional ills? Can mental illness be relieved by nutritional or hormonal elements?

Back in the fifth century B.C.E., Hippocrates, called the ‘father of medicine,’ believed that there could be a connection between poor nutrition and mental illness. And none other than Sigmund Freud, the ‘father of psychoanalysis,’ in his later years wrote: “I am firmly convinced that one day all these disturbances we are trying to understand will be treated by means of hormones or similar substances.”

Use of Hormones

In recent years a number of mental patients have benefited from hormone treatment. Thus a psychiatrist in New York Medical College found synthetic sex hormones to be more effective as well as “less traumatic than electroshock and more rapid than conventional drugs.” By means of hormones he has cured some male patients of depression, and others improved.​—Washington Star-News, May 9, 1974.

The results being obtained with similar sex hormones by a team of Worcester, Massachusetts, biochemists and psychiatrists are even more striking. They produced improvement in 80 percent of their women patients. And they got these results although they chose as patients only hospitalized women who had been “treated unsuccessfully with a ‘variety’ of the conventional therapies, including shock treatment, other anti-depressant drugs and psychotherapy.”​—The Boston Globe, September 30, 1974.

Nutrition

The role that nutrition plays in mental illness has long been recognized in the case of pellagra. It is a disease caused by a lack of vitamin B₃ (niacin), and has insanity as one of its symptoms.

Among those stressing the nutritional approach to mental health is George Watson, a former university professor who is now devoting all his time to psychochemical research. In his book Nutrition and Your Mind he reasons that people are either slow or fast oxidizers, and so must arrange their diet accordingly. His view is: “What you eat determines your state of mind and, in a sense, the sort of person you are.” Watson further claims: “Most erratic behavior is caused by an undernourished brain, an exhausted nervous system or any of a number of other physical problems directly related to imperfectly functioning metabolism.” He tells of curing a patient having an extreme form of schizophrenia by feeding her the needed or lacking nutrients.

Approaching mental illness in a similar fashion are the more than 500 physicians and psychiatrists belonging to the Hypoglycemia Foundation. These hold that low blood sugar can cause depression, anxiety, forgetfulness, tremors, nightmares and nervous breakdowns.

The nutritional approach also stresses the importance of trace elements in treating mental illness. The value of lithium, for example, is generally recognized. A Texas biochemist found that in a number of Texas cities where there were higher levels of lithium in drinking water there was less mental illness. Thus Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry Dr. Leon Eisenberg says: “We can help manic depressive patients to stay well after they recover from an episode of illness by administering the element lithium as a prophylactic.”​—World Health, October 1974.a

In addition to lithium, other trace elements found in certain foods, including zinc, calcium, manganese, magnesium, iron, copper, cobalt, chromium, selenium and molybdenum, may also play an important role in mental illness. In fact, more and more psychiatrists are recognizing the importance of these.

“Orthomolecular Psychiatry”

The term “orthomolecular psychiatry” was coined by Nobel prize winner Dr. Linus Pauling to designate a treatment which stresses “the importance of having the right concentration of the right substances in the right places.” The term comes from two root words​—ortho meaning that which is straight, right, correct (as in the word “orthodox”), and molecular, which comes from the word “molecule.”

Pauling explains: “The proper functioning of the brain is known to require the presence in the brain of molecules of many different substances,” which reach the brain in the blood. He holds that in certain mental illnesses there is a failure on the part of the body to utilize properly the vitamins and trace minerals found in food. To compensate for this genetic defect, he recommends that the patient be fed massive doses of vitamins and/​or have his diet adjusted in other ways. The emphasis is on the use of vitamins B₁, B₃, B₆, B₁₂, C and H.

However, there is the most violent disagreement over the relative merits of “orthomolecular psychiatry.” Professor Carlos A. León of Ecuador, for example, says that “there is as yet no conclusive proof of [its] effectiveness.” In the same vein the American Psychiatric Association has gone on record, saying that the “proponents of megavitamin therapy have made striking, and often unsupported, claims regarding its efficacy.” And Dr. S. Kety, professor of psychiatry at Harvard’s Medical School, claims that this approach is “premature application of incomplete knowledge.”

On the other hand, Dr. David Hawkins, in Manhasset, New York, tells of treating 5,000 schizophrenic patients in this way, and claims that more than 4,000 registered improvement. In fact, he has found that by adding vitamin treatment to regular psychotherapy and chemotherapy he can nearly double the recovery rate, cut hospitalization in half and entirely eliminate suicides, which are very high among schizophrenics.

Dr. Abram Hoffer, president of the Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation, as well as of its American counterpart, says: “My patients think I’m a nutty psychiatrist because they come to me with mental problems and I send them home with a diet. But eventually they convince themselves it’s important.”

At present more than 300 American psychiatrists are employing this “orthomolecular” approach in their practice, and their number is increasing. They claim to have benefited upward of 30,000 patients. And an item not to be overlooked is that this form of treatment costs only a fraction of what other forms of treatment cost patients and their families.

What to Do

Perhaps you or a loved one have had a struggle with mental illness. If so, as we can see, there are things that can be done to aid recovery.

Since excessive stress is frequently a precipitating factor in mental illness, do all that you can to remove or diminish the source of the stress that may be causing the problem. One may have anxiety over some personal relationship, a situation affecting one’s marriage, or some decision as regards one’s employment or similar problems of life. Then resolve the indecision, or else do all you can to put the matter out of your mind.

In the case of severe mental aberrations, there is the possibility of using drugs or even electroshock to control the situation. However, these treatments are advisable only under professional oversight, and generally as last resorts. In recent years some fine successes are being reported from the use of vitamins and hormones. You may find it beneficial to investigate the possibilities.

But basically the mentally ill person needs help in getting control of his or her thinking. To get help many turn to psychotherapy, perhaps the most well-known form of treatment. What is psychotherapy? Can it help a person to regain mental balance?

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