6 Strategies to Eliminate Depression

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions. And this week's question is, Dr. Hyman, I've struggled with depression for years. Is there anything I can do about it rather than taking these drugs with all these side effects? And how do I get to the root of my depression? Well, you know, as a functional medicine doctor, practicing for years, to get people's bodies healthy, I noticed an amazing side effect, which was as I treated their body, their mood got better, their depression lifted, their anxiety got better. All sorts of brain symptoms improved by fixing their body. And I began to realize that we had our concept of depression all wrong. In fact, one woman I remember, she was struggling for years with depression. She was in and out of mental hospitals on a whole cycle of psychiatric drugs, all with very little benefits, struggle with their marriage, struggle with work, was overweight, just desperate to get better. And we got her to change her diet, do a few simple things and interventions, which I'll share with you in a minute. And in three days, she said, the depression lifted. It was like a veil lifted. She says, is that possible? I said, yes. When you take away the bad stuff and you put in the good stuff, the body has an amazing capacity to heal. And I often talk about the way we do medicine as symptom-based medicine. We look at the symptoms and then we treat the symptoms instead of the causes. And depression is exactly that. We label people with these labels like you have depression, you have bipolar, you have anxiety, and these are just labels, but they don't tell you anything about the cause of the depression. Because you're sad, hopeless, helpless, have no interest in your daily activities, no interest in sex, aren't eating well or you're eating too much, the doctor says, oh, I know what's wrong with you. You have depression. But depression didn't cause those symptoms. It's the name of those symptoms. Knowing the name doesn't tell you anything about the cause. Functional medicine is the pathway. It's a way of thinking about how to get to the cause of those symptoms. For example, let's say you have a gluten sensitivity or an autoimmune condition related to gluten called Hashimoto's thyroid disease. That's a low thyroid condition that can cause depression. Or maybe you've been eating the wrong foods and have reflux and heartburn and been taking an acid blocker for 20 years and can't absorb B12. That can cause depression. You could be vitamin D deficient, like 80% of Americans who live and work inside, or maybe you live in Alaska or Seattle. That can cause depression. Or maybe you've taken a lot of antibiotics and have altered your gut bacteria which changes the bugs in there and that can cause depression. We now know the bugs in your gut or your microbiome, when they're changed because of our poor diet or stress or antibiotics, can also lead to mood disorders. Or maybe you actually love sushi and have mercury poisoning, like Jeremy Piven had mercury poisoning and depression. Or maybe you absolutely hate seafood and fish and you have an omega-3 deficiency or maybe you love sugar and have pre-diabetes or diabetes, which that can cause depression. So because you know the name of the disease, it doesn't tell you anything about what to do. Functional medicine gives you a pathway to think through all those things. So we often attach meaning to things too. I mean, yes, there's reasons for depression. You have loss, you have death, you have trauma, you have, you know, disasters. All sorts of real things happen that can lead to depression. But often we attach meaning to our moods that might not have anything to do with what's really going on in our head. It might be related to what's happening in our body. So I encourage you to check out my book, the UltraMind Solution, which gives you a detailed view of how to think through these things. Is it inflammation from what you're eating? Is it a food sensitivity? Is it imbalances in your hormones like your thyroid or adrenals or sex hormones? Is it because you have altered gut bacteria? Is it because you have nutritional deficiencies like vitamin D or omega-3 deficiencies or folate or B6. I remember a guy was fixing my television once at the house and he had read my blog about this. He said, you, know, I tried the folate and B6 and B12 and I'd been struggling for years with depression and it went away because these vitamins are necessary to make your neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine. Or it could be because you have toxins. You could be exposed to mercury. I know I personally had mercury toxicity and I felt very depressed. and very anxious and very stressed, but it wasn't because there was anything bad happening in my life, it was because I was poisoned. So we actually can get to the root of these things by looking at these various aspects of our health. So if you have depression, I wouldn't lose hope. I would actually look for the root cause and connect with your diet, connect with all these various factors, and you can actually fix these problems. So there's a few simple things you can do, and I encourage you to try these on your own. to see if it'll help your depression. And this is all backed by research. There's over 500 published peer review references in my book, AltuMd. The first is eat real food. I keep saying this over and over again, but it works for everything. It's not like there's one diet to prevent cancer and one diet for depression and one diet for heart disease, another diet for diabetes, another diet for autoimmune disease. There's one healthy human diet that works for actually resetting the body to its original factory settings. And it generally involves removing the inflammatory foods, and putting in anti-inflammatory foods, whole real fresh food. So get rid of gluten and dairy, that's an easy thing for most people to do to see if it resets their system. And eat good fats like omega-3 fats from fish, coconut oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, these are all great fats, olive oil, and eat good quality protein because you know what, your brain makes neurotransmitters from protein, the amino acids and protein. Also cut down on the sugar because sugar really drives depression. you get a spike a little bit in your mood and then you crash. So eating real food, good fats, good quality protein, low sugar. Next, exercise. We know that exercise can have as much benefit as Prozac for treating depression. If you do vigorous exercise 30 minutes, four or five times a week, very powerful antidote to depression. Getting enough sleep, simple things, but getting seven or eight hours sleep, I mean we are sleeping an hour or two less average per person in America than we did 100 years ago. That has an impact on us. So get good quality sleep. Also make sure that you take the right nutrients. We all need omega-3 fats. We all need vitamin D. And we all need what I call methylating nutrients. That's folate, B6, and B12. And they're all outlined on my website and my book, the UltraMind Solution, to give you a clear pathway to getting healthy. So real simple stuff. very easy to do and often the depression isn't connected to your emotional state, it's connected to your physical state. So reset that and amazing things can happen. So I'd like to hear your story. How have you struggled with depression? What have you found works? What things actually have you discovered that I may not have mentioned that could help you? Share it with us because we're all a community, we're all learning from each other. So if you like this video, sign up for my weekly newsletter@drhyman.com, share the video, on Facebook and Twitter with your friends and family and submit a question at DrHyman.com so next week I may make a house call to you.