My experience in practicing holistic mental health care and preventive psychiatry over the past decade tells me that any exposure (inhalation, swallowing, transdermal) to toxic chemicals (including legal psychoactive drugs as well as illicit ones), toxic metals (such as mercury [from fish or vaccines], lead, cadmium, aluminum, uranium, etc.), toxic industrial pollutants, solvents, food additives (NutraSweet, Splenda, MSG) and even electromagnetic fields (cell phones, microwave towers, high voltage wires) may cause acute and/or chronic neurodegenerative processes that may cause the victim to appear mentally unwell. The particular mental, emotional or behavioral manifestations of these neurological insults will depend on the location of the brain impacted, the intensity and duration of exposure, the individual’s stage of neurological and psychological developmental and various resiliency factors (such as the absence of other toxins, the quality of nutrition, the presence of antioxidants, the use of brain nourishing supplements, etc.)
In our medicalized culture, abnormal emotions or behaviors oftentimes lead to the use of psychiatric drugs (all of which are potentially neurotoxic), and subsequent drug-induced insomnia and sleep deprivation, tranquilizer-induced learning and attention problems, drug-induced mania, aggression, suicidality, poor appetite - and even eating "disorders" always cause malnutrition and/or toxic food ingestion (and thus more neurological impairment). Parental rejection or punishment, high emotional stress are common in our culture and will always adversely affect personality development, academic achievement or social or athletic accomplishments.
Most psychotropic drugs can also adversely affect a multitude of organ systems besides the brain. Therefore there are a host of other problems, including prescription drug-induced obesity, diabetes, appetite over-stimulation and, conversely, (depending on the type of drug involved) anorexia, chronic fatigue, sleep abnormalities, sexual dysfunction and weight loss. Such abnormal physical disabilities can add significantly to the victim’s social mal-development, with teasing, ostracization, isolation, impaired athletic ability and poor job performance.. Such drug-induced disabilities can also cause learning problems, impaired creativity and other abnormal behaviors in any of a multitude of symptom complexes.
Therefore, what often results is an unending chain of therapeutic misadventures, misdiagnoses, new prescriptions to cover-up the toxic effects of the last drug often ending up with inpatient commitments or electroshock “therapy” to the brain when the drugs fail or actually make the patient worse). In the end, large numbers of patients eventually wind up disabled for life and dependent on social security disability payments in order to survive.
I am sad to say that the above scenario is one I have witnessed more times than I can count. In my opinion it is a national disgrace that is totally preventable.
What I am saying (and have been saying, teaching and writing about for some time now) is that there is no such thing as ADHD (of “unknown etiology”) or Autistic Spectrum Disorder (of “unknown etiology”) or Depression (of”unknown eiology”) or even Schizophrenia (of ‘unknown etiology”).
Rather, what we do have are previously normal people with neurological and mental ill health of known (or knowable) causes. I have had extensive experience in dealing, on a daily basis, with “psychiatric” patients who have been heavily drugged and stigmatized after being told that they were mentally ill and would be so for the rest of their life, when their problem actually was a temporary and curable one. What I have found is that such patients’ problems almost always started with psychological trauma (which of course isn’t a mental illness at all, but rather a condition that normal people in crisis situations can easily develop when exposed to significant or persistent abuse or other types of violence) or neurological insults from toxins, trauma, brain damage from psychiatric drugs (such as neuroleptics, SSRIs, tranquilizers, anti-epileptic drugs, so-called “mood stabilizer” drugs, psychostimulants) or other identifiable toxic chemicals in their environment.
What has been missing for far too long in the history of American psychiatry and medicine are enlightened, thorough and caring doctors willing and able to spend hours and weeks sleuthing for the root causes of the psychological symptoms and/or the neurological insults which in my experience almost always can be found.
If that careful process is followed, patients can then be freed from the stigmatization of their "mental illness" labels (which is instantly therapeutic!) and thus also be freed from the unnecessary, chronic psychotropic drug “treatments”. Such an approach offers a new lease on life unless the patient is already too brain damaged by the chronic use of psychotoxic or neurotoxic drugs or is irretrievably brain-starved by their nutritionally-depleted or toxic diets. Whether the patient’s prognosis is good or bad, he or she deserves to be given a therapeutic trial of careful and gradual withdrawal from the toxic drugs, a high-quality, brain-nourishing diet and appropriate and specific brain-nourishing food supplements.
This method has worked well for the vast majority of my patients since I started using it a decade ago. I have hundreds of grateful patients (and their families), who know they are fortunate survivors of a dysfunctional health system that has been essentially unaware of the long-term adverse effects of the drugs that were often handed out to them like candy. Many of these psychiatric survivors are enhancing their healing process by becoming activists in groups like MindFreedom International (www.mindfreedom.org) in order to warn others about what must be acknowledged as a national tragedy of unimaginable proportions, all caused by the widespread and incautious use of dangerous, brain-altering, synthetic chemicals that are often also dependency-inducing and therefore are commonly associated with serious withdrawal symptoms if the situation is not handled carefully, slowly and knowledgeably.
The story of the adverse influence of the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on physicians is a complicated story that well is documented elsewhere. To tell the full story about the therapeutic system that I have been using over the past decade or so would take a two day training seminar, with a lot of audiovisual aides, case histories, a review of basic neuroscience, neuropharmacology and neurotoxicology and the teaching of basic brain nutritional science.
For more information, visit Dr. Kohls' website, mindbodymedicineduluth.com, or watch Dr. Kohls' videos or listen to his podcasts on natural health.
