Guest Post - How I Cured my Depression

Today I'm featuring a guest post from Jane Henderson. Enjoy!


How I Cured my Depression


My name is Jane and I suffered from depression and anxiety for over 20 years. I hated myself, felt like my life was terrible and would never get any better and went to bed and cried for several hours every night, trying to work up the courage to end it all.

I saw numerous doctors, psychiatrists and just about every kind of natural health practitioner you can think of to no avail. Several years of therapy only made me worse. I spent 10 years on antidepressants, which helped a bit but not enough. They left me in a dull, grey world where I couldn’t feel much of anything except mild depression. Every couple of years the effect of the antidepressants would wear off and I would collapse in a heap and have to switch to a different antidepressant.

Eventually I decided to research depression myself. I got every book I could lay my hands on and spent hours each week on the internet. Finding a cure for my depression became an absolute obsession. And the more I looked, the more amazed I became to find that depression is often caused by simple physical problems that lead to an imbalance in brain chemistry. Yet most physicians prescribe antidepressants without doing a single test to look for the cause of the problem.

My first success was finding out about a condition called pyroluria, an excess of a substance called pyrroles in the bloodstream. Pyrroles bind to zinc and B6 and dump them out in the urine, causing a severe deficiency of zinc and B6. These 2 chemicals are required for over 100 different chemical reactions in the brain and the combined deficiency is a psychiatric disaster.

Pyroluria described me to a tee – not just the emotional symptoms of depression, anxiety and social withdrawal, but a host of physical symptoms that I had never considered could be related to my depression. Stretch marks that I developed as a child; morning nausea; a poor sense of smell; thin, fragile fingernails and constantly feeling cold – all of these were symptoms of pyroluria. I had been a vegetarian for some years and even that was explained by pyroluria, as the zinc deficiency causes low levels of stomach acid and difficulty digesting protein.

I couldn’t find a doctor who knew about pyroluria but was certain I had it so started treating myself by taking high doses of zinc, B6 and some other supplements. Within a week I felt much, much better. I thought I had finally found the solution, but after a few weeks I started to feel worse again.

After years more of searching, a lot of trial and error and a number of wrong turns, I finally found the full picture. As well as pyroluria, I had a mutation in my MTHFR gene that meant I couldn’t convert folic acid from food into the form of folate that is used in the body. I had a leaky gut and a number of food intolerances, probably caused by having had untreated pyroluria for many years (low zinc causes low stomach acid which leads to various digestive problems). I also suffered from adrenal fatigue and hormonal imbalances, again caused by having untreated pyroluria for so many years.

I now take a handful of supplements every day, am completely off antidepressants and feel better than I have ever felt before. The days when all I could do was lock myself in my room and cry are completely gone. I am finding joy in life again, my energy levels are gradually returning and I am learning how to talk to people after years of avoiding social contact.

I am convinced that depression is caused by an imbalance in brain chemistry and can usually be cured by finding and treating the cause of the imbalance. Your brain needs an adequate supply of natural chemicals like serotonin, endorphins, dopamine and GABA in order to feel happy, positive and relaxed. If for some reason you don’t have enough of any of these chemicals, then no matter how much therapy you have, you won’t be happy.

Even in cases where depression obviously follows a stressful event such as the death of a loved one, there is an underlying imbalance in brain chemistry. Have you ever wondered why some people can deal with enormous stresses without becoming depressed, while others become depressed after a single stressful event? The answer is brain chemistry. Your brain uses up certain chemicals much more rapidly under stress. If you produce an abundance of these chemicals then you will be able to deal with stress without becoming depressed, but if your production of these chemicals is a little on the low side, your supply of “happiness chemicals” may become depleted under stress and you can slide into depression.

The important thing is to find the cause of your depression and treat the cause. If your depression is caused by pyroluria then high doses of zinc and B6 can work wonders, but if your depression is caused by something else, high doses of zinc and B6 will either have no effect or will make you feel worse. If you have taken herbs or supplements for depression in the past and found they didn’t help, chances are you were taking the wrong supplements for your condition.

Fortunately, there is no need to use a “trial and error” approach to treating depression. Different causes of depression have different symptoms and in most cases, blood tests, urine tests or saliva tests can be used to make a proper diagnosis.

You can find a series of questionnaires for 13 of the most common causes of depression at www.gethelpfordepression.info. The site is designed to give you an idea of what might be causing your depression and help you find a health care practitioner who is familiar with your condition. I hope it will help you find the answer to your depression.

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Jane Henderson suffered from depression and anxiety for over 20 years and spent years researching the condition. She eventually found the cause of her depression and was able to treat it successfully using vitamins, minerals and natural supplements. She wrote www.gethelpfordepression.info to share the information she found in her search for a cure.