What’s a natural treatment for postpartum depression? Postpartum depression may be the label they gave you for pain, fatigue, vivid dreams waking you up, nausea, or anxiety. However, these symptoms are mislabeled as depression. Are you taking medication because a doctor says you have “postpartum depression,” or to decrease your frequency of “panic attacks?”
Postpartum depression: inappropriate diagnostic label
“Postpartum” is the Latin word for “after childbirth.” It denotes a limited time period directly after childbirth—some references say that it can be up to six weeks after giving birth—but it is definitely not ongoing. Are you still labeled with a diagnosis of “postpartum depression” even years after giving birth? It’s BS. The diagnostic label doesn’t match the time frame. For example, feeling depression four years after giving birth is not postpartum depression because you are not postpartum anymore. If you have not given birth yet, you are not postpartum either! The postpartum diagnosis doesn’t fit; it is inappropriate, and you are not growing into it.
The depression misdiagnosis
“Depression” can be the lowering or reducing of something. Panic on the other hand describes frenzy. So, are they the same? No! Opposites are not the same. A psychological label of “postpartum depression” may lead to a prescription with a drug that supposedly treats depression and anxiety (Effexor®), but you still get “panic attacks” anyway.
What is the purpose of that? All it does is temporarily make everything less noticeable without changing anything about your underlying condition. That type of treatment is not a sustainable choice.
Effexor® is an example of a class of drugs in the “serotonin-norepinephrine re-uptake inhibitors” category. They inhibit normal processes that happen on a microscopic level in the brain. The manufacturer’s website gives a strong warning that states “Patients who are started on therapy should be observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality [sic], or unusual changes in behavior.”(1) There are many other unwanted side effects for this class of drugs; like the similar SSRI drug class. Side effects include physical and psychological dependence, anxiety and agitation, insomnia, bizarre vivid nightmares, nervousness, and sleepiness.(1,2)
What!!? Your symptoms may be the side effects of the drug you take!
Drugs just suppress symptoms
If you were to stop taking your medication (hypothetically), what do you think would happen? Do you think your “panic attacks” would come back, more frequently?
Do you see what’s happening here? The treatment is temporary and now you could be feeling stuck. Psychoactive drugs are addictive, they need weaning-off over time. Where’s the plan to wean off this addictive substance? It is ironic that a slogan for selling Effexor® is “Break The Cycle” which insinuates that a person could take this addictive drug for a short time, then just stop and be better. Is that the way this drug is prescribed? Clearly not. After years of taking such a drug, you don’t break out of any cycle.
You need the correct healing path. There are two faulty premises a prescribing doctor initially assumed about you, and bestowed upon you when prescribing the medication. One: it was a misguided and dangerous belief that your problem should be labeled as “postpartum depression.” Two: the disempowering premise is that your feelings are “caused by your brain.” So what’s your alternative?
Integrative treatment vs. depression treatment
Depression is a symptom, not the cause. According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, the brain is a processing station, receiving four hundred billion pieces of information per second. Your brain is not the cause of the information; it is the receiver. The brain interprets of all the sensory information delivered to it from the body.
If the information coming to your brain is distorted, irritating, insufficient, excessive, or random, then your brain will react to those aberrant stimuli. Your brain reacts normally—it’s the information it receives which is aberrant. In chronic disease like neurodegeneration, the brain eventually changes too. Depression is a symptom about things in your body.
What got you off track is not your brain. Many processes in the body need support first. Why would they use a drug that shuts down the brain’s ability to normally react? Wouldn’t that be bad science and bad medicine? We have been bombarded with false information about the brain’s role in too many erroneously labeled “mental disorders.” Tragically, this misinformation dominates depression treatments.
Old beliefs, outdated perspective
Why do doctors “manage” women that way? One reason is because of an outdated, demeaning and dangerous medical belief: “It’s all in your head.” If any of your medical decisions are based on such an outdated opinion, then the treatment protocols used on you will be outdated too. Optimal health will never have a chance to manifest for patients embedded in a medical system that proclaims: “it’s all in your head.”
The second reason is in the way that the current medical paradigm generally compartmentalizes symptoms into segmented, local areas of the body, and labels those areas (or areas immediately adjacent) as the cause of the problem. Examples are Adult ADD or brain fog. Acknowledging whole body interconnections is not the medical norm today. Medicine’s history of unnecessary tonsillectomies, appendectomies, and stomach bypasses for weight loss, illustrates their general concept of “independent body parts,” not whole body integration.
It’s no wonder that we have people being told “it’s all in your head,” and getting treatment with antidepressants for a “mental disorder,” whether the symptoms are those labeled as depression or panic attacks. Unfortunately, it’s part of the established status quo of conventional Medicine. However, there are integrative medicine systems, outside of this status quo. So, you have choices.
Our key advantage is our chiropractic initial premise: Your body should be able to regulate itself, if your healing potential were not blocked to some degree. Your depression is not the starting point, it is the end point. The “mental disorder” starts in the body, not the brain. Your body parts naturally affect and depend on each other, integrated by a master controlling system called your nervous system. Biological information comes from every part of your body. That information integrates through your nervous system, and your brain interprets the information (basic brain neuro-science). Therefore, we focus on the initiators of depression, understanding your body as the source.
All of your body parts connect. Therefore, it’s not “all in your head.”
After an injury, the body and brain respond. For example, the spinal muscles get tighter and back pain may be next. The body-brain responds like a chain reaction. The heart begins pumping faster or harder (references 3,4,5), sleep becomes impaired, the onset of nausea, impaired attention, nervousness—all these are symptoms relating to the initial injury. The body-brain sequentially responds. Therefore, is the solution to shut down the brain’s responsiveness with an addictive drug? No!
“Depression is not a disease. It’s a symptom.” – Kelly Brogan, MD
Integrative chiropractor for depression?
Whole body chiropractic helps reestablish normal function, rejuvenate, and rebuild health—even after drugs have left their scars. We can use entirely alternative, non-drug, physical procedures to help your body. We use natural remedies like whole food concentrates, whole herbs, and homeopathic remedies, instead of poisonous pharmaceuticals with their devastating side effects.
Alpha-Stim SCS
We also have the Alpha-Stim in our Orange County health center. The Alpha-Stim SCS (Stress Control System) cranial electrotherapy stimulator (CES device) is a microcurrent device that can help with treatment of anxiety, depression, insomnia and other stress-related “disorders.” It helps your brain produce relaxing, calming alpha waves. The Alpha-Stim® SCS can be an adjunct to better recovery, and you can try the AlphaStim to see how it feels.
Break the cycle
In order to really “break the cycle,” utilize a multifaceted physical, nutritional and neuro-emotional (not psychological) approach to your whole body.(4) There is no magic medicine for depression, and the causes of depression in individuals may be entirely different. Therefore, each person needs an integrative evaluation to determine their best non-drug, non-medical treatment.
Our safe, drug-free approach is for optimizing health. Now, you can fundamentally get better, and that is a beautiful thing. Call us today. Start now.
References:
1. https://www.effexorxr.com
2. www.petitiononline.com/effexor (page no longer available)
3. Chaitow, Leon, Soft-Tissue Manipulation: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Diagnosis and Treatment of Soft-Tissue Dysfunction and Reflex Activity (1987)
4. ‘Muscle contraction related to heart’ Humphreys, P. W. and Lind, A.R., Journal of Physiology (1963), pp. 120-1355.
5. Jacobson, E., ‘Principles Underlying Coronary Heart Disease,’ Cardiologia (1955), pp. 26-836.
6. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1999 Jun; 88(3 Pt 1): 1019-28.