Mold Exposure and Mental Health

If you have had any experience with environmental illness and mold, this will make a lot of sense to you.

Really excited. I have here Dr. Ana Roth today. You know, the environment impacts mental health, for those that don't know that. And this is a very important topic that we're going to cover today on how the environment impacts mental health and what sort of mental health issues might people experience in an unhealthy environment. Without further ado, Dr. Anna Roth. Thank you so much for being on here today.

Hi, everyone. My name is Dr. Anna Roth. I am a clinical psychologist and I want to talk today about mold and mental health. My handle is@_. Dr. Anna, if you want to learn a little bit more about me, I want to start my presentation today with a quote. And if you have had any experience with environmental illness and mold, this will make a lot of sense to you. And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through or even how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. Anybody who has been touched by mold illness or environmental illness or poor air quality knows exactly the heart of this quote. That's so powerful, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah. I want to tell you a little bit about what my plan is to talk about in the next 20 minutes so you can decide if this is a talk that you want to tune into. I know that there's a lot of different talks. As a part of the summit, I'm going to say a little bit about me, my story with environmental and mold illness. Mold illness through the lens of a psychologist. Why I didn't see a psychiatrist. How do you distinguish mold illness from mental illness? The benefits and the hard parts. What helped and what harmed. What I want to say, whether you've been through it or someone you love has. And I want to start with my story, just so you know why you should maybe listen to me. You don't have to. This is a little bit about my experience. I've spent 17 years as a PhD psychologist working with at risk families to executive coaching in Silicon Valley. I have a master's and a doctorate from University of Minnesota, executive coaching training from Berkeley. I'm a yoga teacher, online educator, Instagram person. I have a therapy group called Soul House. And my passion is success for people, not at the price of soul. I help people make themselves home. I really feel passionate. Even more so after my environmental Illness, experience, that healthy environments are so key no matter where we are in life. And I am going to start by telling you just briefly my story. I think it is important that these stories get out there because once you start to hear them, they're so similar. Every story is so similar. So if you. It's. Yeah. And it's why I'm here, because I've been through this. So in January 2021, I followed my own California dream from Minnesota to Mill Valley, California, into what I thought was a dream rental. And at that time, I had a thriving business and a book deal. I was an avid runner and a hiker, and I couldn't wait to explore northern California. By March 8, from that January, I was in the emergency room with a heart rate of 40. I was dizzy, I had difficulty breathing and walking. I had no clue what was going on. I felt like I was going to pass out all the time. Four months later, 30 pounds heavier, having difficulty walking and reading, I lost hearing in one side of my ear. I started feeling like I was in a burning building all the time. And I couldn't understand why. I just want to show that visually. Only four months in, and I stayed 11 months in that rental because I didn't know what was wrong. At the end of my time there, I could no longer walk. I was panicked and disoriented. I hallucinated. I couldn't read. Like I said, I was heavier, lost my hearing, lost my hair. It was insane.

Jesus.

And it wasn't right. It wasn't until I finally found a mold literate doctor after I went through, like everyone does, 10 different doctors or however many, that I found someone who said, test your home. And what was found was extreme levels of neurotoxic mold in every room of the house. When I had a mold inspector come in, he literally put his hand through my office wall. It was 100% water damaged. Didn't even have to try. I was like. And I didn't understand that, that how bad that was. Looking back, I'm like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe that. So here's, you know, like many people, I lost everything. There's all my stuff, you know, but I lost. And I spent the last year or so mostly in hotels alone because I was too chemically sensitive to be in the world. As I unmasked for mold and started to detox, I was constantly ill as my immune system couldn't fight infection. I still navigate that. And it was the most brutal experience of my entire life. The hardest part about it. For me, other than watching my sweet dog suffer and not being able to confidently speak, read, or write was losing my personality and not being believed that I had a brutal physical illness and injury rather than a presumed mental illness. Many people in my life distance from me. It really hurt and it still does. And that's why I'm here, because it is part of reclaiming my own dignity and my own reputation. But I know that anyone who has experienced this, most people have felt gaslit or minimized or like they're crazy or people assume it's their mental health. So I really want to distinguish how they're different, not only to validate people who have been through this, but if you're listening, you haven't been through it, but you want to learn. I want you to feel more clear on that difference as well. I also think it's important to name that I did have a diagnosed brain injury from the mold. I went to one of the best brain injury treatment centers in the country, did FMRIs, and those FMRI showed I lost my memory, my ability to retrieve words, internal monitoring, and my vision and vestibular systems are impaired. They still are, so. And I still kind of struggle to find words sometimes. I think that this is a component of mold and environmental illness that isn't known well enough. I know Dr. Bresden is going to be presenting. I brought his book to this treatment center and said, look, I have like, type 3 Alzheimer's inhalation based, so, you know, we kind of have to teach people as we go. But I, you know, even though I'm still doing different things for treatment, saunas and resting my eyes, I. And I'm still in the fight. But for the most part, I have myself back. I'm rebuilding my health and my life and my work to the point that I'm able to be here and do something like this. So I think that that's really important too, that you see people's stories and you see them get through it, that there is hope.

Yay.

I know. So I feel so grateful. I feel so grateful. But I want to use both my experience and my education to do my part to raise awareness. Because no one should have to go through this hellish experience and not be believed, protected, or treated. Clean air should be a right and not a privilege. And I want to do my part.

Amen.

Amen. So what I want to start by saying is that mold masks is mental illness. So just in short, mental illnesses or health conditions that involve changes in emotion, thinking, or behavior or some Combination, they're associated with distress or problems functioning in social work or family. There is no environmental illness acknowledged in the dsm, which is the bible of mental health that all mental health clinicians use to diagnose. But I would argue that every mental illness is caused by environment, be it physical, cultural or family. And because mold drastically impacts our functioning in every area and impacts our central nervous system, brain and biology, it can look like mental illness. But it's super important to distinguish cause from symptom. Anxiety, panic, depression, PTSD bereavement, they're secondary diagnoses to the primary physical diagnosis. And lack of mold literacy in medical and mental health communities results in the majority of people being misbelieved and assumed to be somaticizing or malingering. I got referred to occupational therapists and like all these different things and you can just tell when people give you the side eye, they're like, believe you at all. So that's why it's so key to hold firm on the focus of the cause. Because once mold illness is treated, those associated mental health symptoms will abate in time. Why I didn't see a psychiatrist. So at points in my experience, I had extreme out of body panic like I'd never experienced before. I reached out to my doctor for help and he not so, like, subtly recommended I see a psychiatrist. He later came back and apologized to me because after being exposed to black mold himself and having the same symptoms, he was like, I'm so sorry, I completely get it now.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. But he, I mean, it was, it was offensive, right? Because you're like, I don't know what's happening to me. And they're like, you just need pills. And. And I knew, I knew I didn't need a psychiatrist because I knew my problem wasn't mental health. I had that benefit of my training and my personal experience of working on myself. It's part of what you do to be a good psychologist, right? Like you clean up your side of the street, like you make sure your stuff's taken care of. So I could really feel the difference between a problem that I was embodying and that was trying to work its way through me versus a problem that was attacking from the outside. And that's a key piece of my experience, was that this illness, environmental illness, when I had any mental health symptoms, it felt like they were happening to me from the outside, like I was being acted upon, rather than if I've ever, you know, felt depressed or something in the past. It kind of felt like this storm that was brewing that I fed through my thoughts and my memories and my feelings. It's like, like a splinter working its way out of you. But mold felt like an invisible force, like punching, slapping and kicking you at random intervals, at random times. It was like a, like just this like weird kind of like outside thing. And that's a really key distinction in my opinion between mold illness and mental health. When it's traditional mental health. Like yes, there's many factors that come into that, but it's like we kind of, we kind of generate it and cook it up ourselves versus like it kind of hitting us randomly and out of nowhere. Another key factor that distinguishes them in my opinion is that how I felt and my external life didn't match. I was so excited to be in California, so many things were going well in my life, but yet I feel like I'm in a burning building. Like those two don't match. Things were going well and I felt like that. So if, if someone's presenting with foreign intense multi system complaints that don't match their psychological and present reality rule out mold and environmental illness. And that goes for, you know, whoever's listening to this. Like if it, you just have this sense, like it doesn't make sense. I think that in and of itself points to environmental illness because usually people have some ideas, some things like that might be contributing to their mental health. If you have no clue, I think it's worth looking at environmental illness. That's just a plug for any of the providers who are watching or listening to assess recent home changes and consider environment and routine assessments. This, if you're watching this, you clearly know more than most, so you're probably not the person. I just think that we need this across the board. There needs to be attention to this. I also want to talk about mold, ptsd. I would be shocked to find someone who has lived through this experience who doesn't have some symptoms of ptsd. So I want to make sure that listeners understand what the symptoms of that are and what they can do to treat it. So the first symptom of mold or any PTSD really is intrusion. That's intrusive thoughts such as repeated and involuntary memories, distressing dreams or flashbacks. The flashbacks can be so vivid that people feel like they're reliving it again. The next is avoidance. Avoiding remembers of the traumatic event could be avoiding people, places, activities, objects, situations that can trigger distressing memories. People may avoid trying, talking about it, thinking about it, remembering it. I noticed that as I was putting this together, I felt that avoidance majorly. I was like, oh, I don't want to see the pictures again. I don't want to remember. But I think it's so empowering to walk into it and take your power back and recognize that this is just something that happened to you. It's not who you are. It was helpful. Thanks for that opportunity. The third category is alterations in cognition and mood. That's the inability to remember important aspects of the traumatic event or time time. It's negative thoughts and feelings leading to distorted beliefs about yourself or the world. No one can be trusted. Distorted thoughts about cause or consequences. Like maybe I blamed myself. Having ongoing fear, anger or guilt. Not enjoying activities as much. Feeling detached from others, not experiencing positive emotions. Another one can even be feeling like you don't have a future, a sense of foreshortened future, like you're not going to live longer. I mean, these are all PTSD symptoms that I think often come with environmental illness and mold illness. And then the last one is alterations in arousal and reactivity. So that can be being irritable and having angry outbursts, being reckless or destructive, being maybe like overly paranoid. And that's like an adaptive part of this illness, I think at some point. Being easily startled, having difficulty concentrating or sleeping. And so, you know, those are kind of the things to look out for if you notice them in yourself. Know that ptsd, whatever it's from, is treatable. EMDR is my favorite and most effective tool for PTSD treatment. It's evidence based, it's effective, and it gets results faster than most talk therapy approaches. What it basically does is it helps the brain digest stuck traumatic memories so that, you know, mold illness happened without feeling like you're stuck back in the heart of it. And you can find EMDR therapistsdria.org, plug in your zip code. You can see providers near you. So that's something to look into if you are, if you are noticing that.

That's a great tip.

Yeah. It's also key to address the nervous system. So even if you don't have PTSD for mold illness, you have to address the nervous system. It boils down to rebuilding safety in your own body. Trauma generally is anything that's too much too soon for too long. And nothing fits that better than mold and environmental illness. So an important goal is to reduce dysregulation nervous system and reduce hyperarousal and vigilance around physical sensation. That's definitely been a part of my journey. Another piece. And anything about mold illness you've probably heard of DNRs, dynamic neural retraining system. An aspect of mold illness and injury is the limbic injury. That's why dnrs is a popular treatment. My key takeaway from this, though, was that it's important to watch out for limbic looping, Getting stuck in a loop of fear or paranoia, and to interrupt that loop as often as needed. I also learned that our thoughts truly can trigger a neuroendocrine immune network response, or cytokine storm. Like, I did not know how. I mean, you know, you always say that you manifest things with your thoughts. Your thoughts have so much power. But to really physically feel the impact of fear and have it set off kind of this mold reaction in you was. Was pretty powerful. So I think that that's key, too, to know that your thoughts are so huge. And given that one of the most important and nearly impossible things to do in mold and environmental illness is to stay calm and so that you can keep yourself and your body in a state of repair. It's like, how can anyone do that in this situation? But that is one of the things that helps the most. One approach that you can look into if you want to learn more about this is polyvagal theory and learning more about your nervous system and how to guide it. My favorite description comes from Deb Dana. Her book is befriending the nervous system. It helps kind of teach you how to shepherd your own nervous system, and that's helpful for everyone. It's what I do with all of my clients. But if you have mold, mold illness, or chemical sensitivity or mcas or whatever the consequences of poor air quality have been for you, you need extra, extra help in reining your nervous system in, because you're getting kind of these different assaults depending on where you're at in your journey. One of my favorite tips, I do this probably every day is called the basic maneuver, and it's by Stanley Rosenberg. His book is assessing the healing power of the vagus nerve. And all you do, essentially, is you lay on the ground flat, you clasp your hands behind your neck, you keep your head straight, and you turn your eyes to the right for 30 seconds to 60 seconds, until you feel, like, a softening in your body, and then you do it the other way until you feel a softening. And essentially what that does is it resets your nervous system. When I was in more intense periods of my mold recovery, I would do this sometimes, like, four times a day, Just trying to settle my nervous system down over and over again. So that's a very Concrete tip for those of you listening could be very, very helpful. Another key component is addressing grief. There is so much loss involved with environmental illness. You lose your sense of safety, you lose your health, you lose your belongings, you lose your career progress, you lose time. There's just a trillion losses. A key part of mold and mental health is addressing grief. My favorite approach for this is the four tasks of grieving by warden, which breaks the grieving process down into four components. Many people think about grief as the stages of grief, but the stages of grief were actually designed to describe the experience of someone who is dying, not the experience that we have when we lose something. So these are the steps that we need to go through when we're grieving anything. I think they're particularly helpful with mold and mental health. And the first one is accepting the reality of the loss intellectually and emotionally. And it's interesting because there's these different phases in mold illness, right? There's the acute phase where you're losing things in the moment and you're dealing with that in the moment. But then as you go a little bit further in your process, you can actually like feel longer term consequences of like the financial cost or of your loss of health. Like you start to feel the loss in a different way. So I think it's, it's just such an integral part of this experience. The second task of that grieving is processing the pain of grief, which means feeling your feelings, feeling the pain, experiencing it directly and releasing it from your body. If you refuse this step, you might like cut yourself off from feeling numb out. I don't know. I think many people feel a lot during this process. I think I cried for two years straight. But we still have to keep feeling the feelings and working with it until it feels really resolved in us. The third and the fourth step are adjusting to the world without what you've lost. So how do I adjust to this world now that I have, you know, permanent hearing issues or I have, I still am, you know, I'm so much better, but I'm still somewhat chemically sensitive. Like how do I live in the world with this, in this, you know, how do I navigate relationships now that I see kind of who leaned in and who leaned out. I mean, there's a lot there. But then I think the most important part is the fourth task, which is remember what you've been through, but find a way to embark on the rest of your life, like living again. So holding both the pain and the, like the suffering and the loss, but then also really re engaging with life. And that could be advocacy, that could be, you know, a hobby. I mean, just doing anything that signifies like, my life is not over. I think it's really key to get mold literate help. We cannot heal alone. Give yourself as much support as you can. Don't stop until you find someone who believes you and keep healing as long as it takes. I think that there, you know, people who are further ahead of me in their mold illness, who were kind enough to mentor me, told me, like, you will be better from this. At points I was like, I do not believe you, but I definitely believe it now. And it really is like enlightenment at gunpoint. Because mold illness causes you to shed everything in your life that's unnecessary. You lose your brain's default network. So that's the whole point with psychedelics, is to like, reboot how you see the world and operate. Like, that's what mold does. Like, it just changes you so profoundly that you see everything differently. It dismantles our ego. We lose externals and attachment to stuff. And so what is left after all of that loss is you, your essence, your true nature, who you always were and who you have always been. That results in what psychologists call post traumatic growth, which is the transformation after trauma. And what that looks like is positive shifts in appreciation for life, relationships with others, new possibilities in life, personal strength and spiritual change. I really feel like through this illness I lost everything, but I gained the world. And I. There's definitely points that I would never have felt like that was possible, but I really do feel that's possible. So wherever you are listening to this, like, I just, just to hold on to that, that you, you may have lost a lot, but you can, you will gain things that you never imagined. And that's important to hear. I want to say a few things before we end and have some questions if there's time for that. I would say what harmed the most in this experience was not being believed. What helped the most was my and others belief that my illness was real and that I could and would heal. To supporters, be curious and willing to learn. You don't have to get this, you don't have to understand it. Just be willing to learn, offer concrete help. Many people are like, just, you know, tell me what you need when you're in survival, living in a hotel so sick, like, you can't even think about, like, what do I need? So the most helpful people for me were like, came to the hotel with me, helped me decontaminate my things, helped me wipe down all my belongings, went with me to doctor's appointments, things like that. And lastly, I would just say lend your strength, because this illness is exhausting. So even if it's just encouragement, that goes a long way. And I want to end by saying what I most want to say is just stay in the fight. I think that's one of the hardest things to do at any point is just stay in the fight. And if you're lucky enough to be on the other side of this, stay in the fight for the people who are still in it or the people who don't have the amount of privilege to be able to fight in a way that will impact change. And that's what this summit is all about and why it's so important, because the fight isn't just an individual fight, it's a collective fight. I also want to say that we're not what happened to us, we're what we do with what happens to us. And I believe you. Which I think is some of the most medicinal words you can hear if you've experienced mold illness. So that is my short spiel. Thanks for hearing me out. I wanted to get a lot in there, so I know I talk fast.

No, thank you.

So open to thoughts, questions, anything in the time we have left.

I do have some questions, I think. You know, first off, I want to kind of summarize just regarding the how our mental health is impacted. We have not only the neurotoxins that get it, we're exposed to in a water damage building, plus VOCs, MVOCs, all the other things that come with this water damage that tends to be a compounding effect, but we also have the trauma that we experience in going through it. All right, so we have, you know, a financial hurdle over repairing our home or, you know, if we have to move, moving out, things of that nature. We also have the financial hurdle of replacing certain things, even cleaning certain things. There's an expense to that, of course. You have the expense, of course, of seeking medical help. And all of that adds up very quick as well. And then, of course, when your quality of life is suffering, well, who's going to be happy about that? So there's anxiety, there's depression, there's a whole host of mental challenges that come along with that. And so all of that together creates a lot of hardship for people mentally, which does impact our mental health here. So thank you for kind of pointing all of that out. Some of the questions that I have just really pertains to how significant do you see this impacting mental health where people don't even know that, that this might be the cause, like living in a water damaged building could be what's causing the health decline, mental health decline, etc.

I mean I think it's massive. Knowing the extent of water damaged buildings, either current active leaks or historical damage in our country and lack of regulation around that. I think that, I mean I would, I don't even, I would say maybe even half of like all mental health is like has an environmental illness component. I mean it's just, I would, I don't know if we started to research that somehow I think it would be incredible if we could do urine tests for anyone who's coming in with paranoia, anxiety, depression, like I think it would be astounding how much overlap there is and that's why I think it's so important. But it's also interesting because it feels like there's just so much fear around this topic. When I've tried to talk with other professionals or other people in my life, it's like they don't want to know. And I think on some level it's because they know that the reach is so vast and that goes to their own home and their own health and. But yeah, I mean I think it's massive to answer.

Yeah. Not to mention you mentioned that we can test individuals, you know, to, to obtain data from changes in individuals maybe as they go to mental, mental health facilities. We also, the EPA developed technology to be able to test these individuals homes too. I mean certainly I think this is a direction we should be looking in because there's, there's a lot of, there's been a lot of developments lately around mental health. We really understand as a society culturally how important mental health is and how there is a connection between physical health and mental health. I mean it's a no brainer. If you're not feeling well physically, you're not going to be happy. There's going to be a hit to our mental health and I think that's really important that we start to put these things together because well, a happy civilization is a productive one. It's going to be good for the economy, it's going to be good for individuals, it's going to be good for societies. This is a massive step forward that we have to take advantage of. I love playing the what if game. Right. Because I think when I played what if in my 20s, it really led to me diving deep into this industry and how important it is to create healthy homes. You know what I'D like to play is, what if this was a larger impact on mental health than we thought? What if half the people, like you said, in these mental facilities are being exposed to high levels of neurotoxins inside the spaces that they live or where they work? This would be huge to know because then we can do something about it.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I think it's so, so key. I think one of the challenges in our American culture is that we're so individualistic, and there's this sense that, like, you, like, you can do something about it or you caused it. So even if people are sick, there's always this underlying suspicion like, you maybe are responsible for this and. Or you're just not, like, working out or you're not eating well enough, or you're, you know, there's some reason why, why you're showing up like this. It's just not even on anyone's radar that it could be environmental illness. And that's why this advocacy work is so important.

I personally do a lot of work as a person to try to always have as optimal mental health as humanly possible. Because let's face it, as a human being, life happens. You get smacked once in a while by the environment, and it could be anything. It could be you need money for something, an accident happens, you go to take out a loan, you're denied. You know, things happen in life that makes you feel like you're being conquered by the environment itself. You're. And what makes that feeling is feeling like you don't have control. Right? And so a lot of that. A lot of that is how you frame your mindset, right? When things happen, it's like, no problem, I'll try something else. You know, there's that mindset that you need to be able to come to that conclusion. And when you're battered, and especially not feeling well, and everywhere you turn, you're being told no, or, you know, you can't do that, or this can't be it. And you're going doctor to doctor to doctor. I mean, that that's going to take a toll on any human being's mental health. And so, you know, you made some very powerful points about, you know, being in control of that mindset and letting that mindset nurture you through the solution. Because a lot of these unanswered problems, they need you to. To think and be in control of finding solutions. And sometimes that. That can be an impossibility when we're so battered. So I think it's. I think a lot of those points you made were really key and can help a lot of people if they can start to get in control of that mindset. Mind. Mindset shift.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's. It's crazy to be up against such tremendous challenge in every area of your life. This doesn't. This touches everything, and yet you're compromised. You're compromised physically, you're compromised mentally. And so I think that's why so many people talk about this experience as being profoundly spiritual for them, because they have to dig deeper to get through. They have to rely on something deeper. And that. I mean, that served. Will serve anyone who's been through this well. So doing your best to kind of keep working the problem through. Like, that's how Marines talk about. Working through crisis is just like, work one problem at a time. And I remember going through that, like, just this one. Like, just figure out this. Just decontaminate this. Like, trying to keep that perspective. But I think you also need to be a part of a healing community, and you need to hear messages like, this won't last forever. Healing is possible. This is not your fault. You can do this. Like, I can't tell you how many times I. I needed to hear that. Like, I could do it from someone else who had been through this journey. So I think those things help a lot, too.

I totally agree. Dr. Anara, thank you so much for your presentation here today. It was a pleasure having you on to explore a very important topic in mental health. And I hope a lot of people got some good takeaways and are ready to take control back of their mental health and their physical health as well.

Sam.