Embracing Mental Health Awareness during Mental Health Awareness Month

Discover the transformative power of mental health awareness with me, Dr. Charlyce, as we navigate the complexities of conditions like major depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder during Mental Health Awareness Month.

Please accept this invitation to the Live Event:
The Healing Arts Toolkit for Mental Health and Wellness

We discuss:

• Major Depression and how to assess your risk with 2 questions
• Generalized Anxiety Disorder
• Bipolar Disorder

If you are having a crisis, you can contact 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Join me, and let's journey together toward better mental health and an understanding that could change lives.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Mental Health Awareness
• 14:59 Understanding Bipolar Disorder and Treatment

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:53

Welcome back to the Art of Healing podcast. This is Dr Charlize and, as always, thank you for joining me for today's episode, which is May, is Mental Health Month. When we talk about mental health, we could be talking about our mental wellness, which is our ability to focus, our ability to feel joy, to feel happiness, connecting with others in a meaningful way. And then we could also be talking about mental health in terms of not feeling well. There's a term in medicine called dysthymia, in which your mood's not good but you don't have clinical depression, or feeling apathy, which is, again, not full depression, just not appreciating joy that you want to appreciate, just not quite feeling yourself. And then, of course, we could also be talking about mental health in terms of diagnosis, and those are when the mental environment has become pervasive and chronic and has not backed off and has led to things such as full-on major depression disorder or generalized anxiety disorder or bipolar disorder. But no matter where you are, you can tell. What I'm leading up to is mental health is important for all of us. We all have to think about our mental health. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 22.8% of US adults experience mental illness in the year 2021. And 5.5% of US adults experience serious mental illness. So that's up to 1 in 20 adults. Nearly 17% of US youths experience some kind of mental disorder, and this is going to be young people between the ages of six and 17. And up to nearly 8% of adults experience mental health disorders in combination with substance use disorders. And it's not that we necessarily need the numbers to remind us because these were before the pandemic, but it's an excellent reminder to all of us that when it comes to mental health illness, mental wellness, that to some extent we're all at risk, and if it's not us personally, it's someone that we know and love. So knowing how common feeling unwell mentally and mental health disorders are, our discussion today is important. It's definitely worth taking note of.

Speaker 1: 3:46

So I want to let you know that the Art of Healing community, the Healing Arts community and Dr Charlize, we have been meeting monthly. We've been doing a free Zoom call or a masterclass, so we'll be doing one this month as well. We'll be meeting on May 25th at noon, central standard time. If you check your show notes you'll see a link to go to the landing page that will sign you up. I'm finding out that works best is to have you register through the landing page first, so that I know who's coming. Then the details of the meeting will come out within about a week to a few days before the meeting. So we are going to be discussing my recommendations for mental health and wellness a toolkit of sorts and with attending this class you'll come away with some tools that you can use to maintain mental health, to have a look if you don't think you're so mentally healthy, and some next steps to take. If you're interested, I would definitely encourage you to sign up. When you sign up, you do get a recording sent to you, but so far, having us having met three times, it's a really nice community and it's nice for you all to get to meet each other. So I want to make sure that I plug that, because I'm noticing that the same folks are attending really getting to know each other. It's a new endeavor. So I think that meeting every month we can see where this takes us. So I think that meeting every month we can see where this takes us.

Speaker 1: 5:19

So the most common mental health disorders, which most of us probably are somewhat familiar with, but at the top of the list, major depressive disorder will be the most common, and this is the clinical condition in which a person suffers from a cluster of symptoms that range from depressed mood, sadness, apathy that we mentioned before sleeping all the time or not being able to sleep, having changes in the way, either going up or down, changes in appetite either more appetite or less appetite. I'll make sure I put in the show notes. Being able to assess yourself for depression is actually a thing. Now, of course, you need to be under the care of a physician, but you can actually gauge your own depression. Risk with answering two questions, risk with answering two questions. So we can do those two questions together right now.

Speaker 1: 6:25

So in the past two weeks, how often have you been bothered with any of the following? In the past two weeks, have you had little interest or pleasure in doing things? And if you would answer yes, would that be not at all? Zero. Several days, that's a score of one. More than half the days, that's a score of two. Nearly every day is a score of three. And the second question is in the past two weeks, how often have you felt down, depressed or hopeless? Zero, none at all. Several days, that's a score of one. More than half the days, that's a score of two. Nearly every day is a score of three, and if you answer yes to any of those, it's actually time to think about next steps. So, although that seems really brief and really short and like probably not enough time to know, is this, am I really having some depression? It turns out that several clinical studies show that just two questions are is quite sensitive, for knowing if someone's at risk of having depression Now. It doesn't mean that you require treatment, and quite the opposite. If you are answering yes to those tests, what it tells you is that it's time to be proactive about your mental health and take some steps to improve your health right now. Mental health, and take some steps to improve your health right now.

Speaker 1: 8:01

Depression is associated with physical diseases, so it's not something that's just in the brain and, matter of fact, many studies are showing that depression really isn't in the brain at all. It's more likely in the gut, but that's a topic for another conversation, isn't it? With depression, we see increased risk of heart disease. It's a well-known statistic that for individuals that suffer from a myocardial infarction, they have a high risk of developing major depression. It used to be. The thinking was that they were just depressed because they had this horrible thing happen to them by having a heart attack. But it turns out there's some neuro biochemical changes within the heart and the brain that are so high risk of leading to clinical depression that patients must be screened for depression and physicians treating patients after a heart attack must be ready to treat them for depression, because it so commonly occurs and that can make recovery from a major event like a heart attack much more difficult. Heart attack is when the heart loses blood flow, so those people come out of the event feeling very tired, having chest pain, not feeling well and recovering from a surgical procedure, in addition to being on many medications, and then to take the additional hit of feeling depression that starts often weeks and months after the major event very difficult.

Speaker 1: 9:42

Depression is also associated with developing diabetes. It is so common for people that are developing diabetes to have symptoms of depression, so much so that sometimes when I'm working with a patient you can't even tell which came first, because for the person that goes on to develop diabetes, they're often having depression symptoms six months to a year before becoming diabetic. But then that's also confusing because the symptoms of diabetes are terrible for the mood Fatigue and anxiety and all those things where a blood sugar fluctuation would cause also are being caused by depression. But there's a strong tie of depression and diabetes and also a strong tie for individuals that are having trouble improving their diabetes or recovering from diabetes their diabetes or recovering from diabetes.

Speaker 1: 10:53

In my practice, we view diseases differently than the way they're viewed in traditional medicine. So in our community we don't see diabetes as a permanent disorder. The way we see it is a temporary disorder that is very much impacting your health, but we anticipate recovery from it. We may have to come up with a number of strategies to help your body heal from diabetes, but the way we see it in the membership practice, diabetes is not permanent. So with my own patients, if we're having trouble with improving the metabolism, improving diabetes, we have an open discussion about what's happening in the mental health landscape and many times that's where we're missing the mark that we may be focusing too much on the nutrition, too much on the muscle movement in the mitochondria, and we're totally missing the mark on maybe something that my patient has gone through that's traumatized them and has brought their mood down and that's what's causing their blood. So anxiety is the next most common mental health disorder that many of us will suffer from.

Speaker 1: 12:18

There is the sensation or feeling of anxiety and there's temporary states of anxiety, but generalized anxiety disorder is the pervasive feeling of doom and gloom, something bad's going to happen. It is the activation of the sympathetic nervous system and basically, you know, the body and the mind are tuned in such a way that everything is working well in terms of survival, but it is not working well as far as rest, digest and flourish. So that means that sleep's disrupted, digestion is disrupted, mood is disrupted, sexual function is disrupted, elimination of waste is disrupted. Elimination of waste is disrupted. All of these systems start to take a toll as the body stays in a state of chronic stress. Individual that are suffering from generalized anxiety disorder suffering more frequently from chronic pain, digestive disorders, heart issues, especially high blood pressure. For individuals that have chronic high blood pressure, there is an element of anxiety to your disease, of anxiety to your disease, whether or not that is on the conscious or the subconscious levels totally different, but it definitely is there. Your hypertension or high blood pressure, unless it has a known and obvious cause, more than likely has something to do with your autonomic system being in a constant state of stress and changing your hormone system so that everything is tuned to stress, creating a system in which your blood pressure stays higher than it needs to be all of the time. There are actually a number of questionnaires online that you can do for yourself. If you are concerned about having a generalized anxiety disorder and I'll make sure to put that in the show notes, and again, that's not the same as just being anxious some of the time but either with that and depression, just know that, even if you're worried about possibly developing it, it's definitely time to talk about it, definitely time to take some preventative steps, or, if you're already being treated for those, really just reacquainting yourself with what that feels like and maybe even having a look at anything else that's going on in your body and if there's a relationship to that and the mental health issue that you are trying to heal.

Speaker 1: 15:00

Another common mental health disorder is bipolar disorder, which, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, is a serious mental illness in which unusual shifts in the mood, ranging from extreme highs to extreme lows, are present, and the person who suffers from bipolar disorder has changes in their energy, thinking and sleep. Bipolar disorder has a number of variations. So there is a bipolar disorder that's characterized more of having the mania or too much energy. There is a bipolar disorder that's characterized as having the depression part and then there's variations in between. Bipolar disorder is difficult in the diagnostic stage because, as far as this shifting of mood, I've heard people say commonly in conversation on social media oh, I felt so, bipolar, I felt so, and what they're referencing is well, I'm assuming what they're referencing is that their mood changed rapidly. They went from happy to angry or sad to joyful or something like that where the mood shifted quickly.

Speaker 1: 16:28

While that is an aspect of bipolar disorder in general, in bipolar disorder those states of being are going for a long time, over several months to even years, where a person may live in mania and not realize it and then, because of biochemical changes, the brain and the nervous system becoming just simply burnt out, shifts to a state of depression in which the person cannot function, can't do as much, is feeling frustrated because they may recall three or four months ago they could work two jobs, run on two hours of sleep, still have time to party with friends, still drink, still this long list of things they were doing to now not getting out of bed for 20 hours a day. For people who are surviving bipolar disorder, this becomes a reality, but this is a very painful and uncomfortable way to live Because the mania has consequences on the mind, the body and the life. Individuals that are having mania can often make very bad decisions. Because they have more, will often feel that they can accomplish things that they aren't capable of. Things that can occur during mania are spending money that you don't have, to the point that it looks like a shopping disorder.

Speaker 1: 17:57

Some people with mania may engage in things like gambling. Some people may engage in behaviors such as abuse of illicit drugs or excessive behaviors like having multiple sexual partners, and that's not normally something that they would do. And when people are in mania, typically this isn't a state they stay in all of the time. It tends to be something that's going on for several months and then, for reasons we understand and don't, there's a shift in which a person crashes and then the exact opposite state exists. So when that depression sets in, it means that the person doesn't have the energy to do things that they want to do, possibly aren't functional, and it's also a dangerous place to be because in that depression, or even in the mania, harming self-harm is a real reality.

Speaker 1: 18:58

To mention that, if you're listening to this and you're in a bad place, and you're actually, if some of this is resonating with you, particularly this self-harm, there are resources that you can reach out to pretty much worldwide, definitely in the United States. If you dial 988 from any phone, you can connect to someone to talk to right away if you were in a mental health crisis. So as we're traversing through this, please don't feel prideful. If you're hearing this and maybe I'm uncovering something very deep with you you should reach out for help. Absolutely, you should call 988, call your physician if some of this is resonating with you. But do understand that especially thoughts of harm, death, dying, killing yourself, hurting yourself, is not normal and is treatable and something can actually be done. But in particular, bipolar disorder that's when things can become dangerous because in those extreme states the judgment and the thinking don't correlate with who the person really is. So that covers the most common mental health disorders or mental issues illnesses.

Speaker 1: 20:18

I wanted to do an overview because throughout this month we're going to touch on these. We're going to touch on some of the biological consequences of these and then towards the end of the month. During the masterclass that we'll have together, we'll talk about first steps that you can take. If this is you Now, if you are someone who is suffering from one of these disorders and you're wondering if there is a different approach than traditional medicine, which can be multiple pharmaceuticals yes, there is. So I encourage you.

Speaker 1: 20:56

If, after this podcast, you are interested, you can sign up for a free call with me. Now. My services are not available in every state. However, I've found that just with the connection call we can figure out something that can help you, even if it's not directly working with me. So, as always, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Make sure you check your show notes so that you know how to connect for this month's masterclass, which will be exciting. And if you are not on my email list, you should definitely sign up, because in the email you get a copy of this podcast and other resources and information. Thank you for joining me and I'll see you next week.