What If Mental Illness Isn't Real?

We’ve been told by doctors and psychiatrists based on symptoms we experience which are categorized in this book called the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual). There are series of symptoms that go with a certain code or psychiatric disorder. You are now officially diagnosed. Here are a slew of medications to help with those symptoms and if you have any side effects, there’s more medication for that. But don’t you worry, you’ll feel better.

But what if we don’t? Oh, that’s okay. There’s more medication for that. Perhaps you have a dual diagnosis. That’s it. Here’s more medication for that and if you have side effects, we have medication for that.

There was never a chemical imbalance in your brain. It was never true. We have been marketed by insurance companies and doctors to prescribe medications to treat the chemical imbalances, but what we were doing was giving medication to people for the incorrect reasons.

Trauma whether big or small impacts our entire bodily system. Each time you experience trauma your body is taking an imprint and storing it as memory. At the time of trauma your brain takes over because it’s doing what it only knows what to do and that is to survive and keep you safe. At the time of trauma you’re not fully processing the emotions at hand and when that goes unprocessed for long periods of time it’ll come back to “haunt” you.

When we are triggered by something, a situation or a person in our present day our body doesn’t know the difference from the initial trauma and this very moment occuring. Our bodies are being thrown back into time and we may feel those same bodily sensations like sweating, heart racing, bodily pain in certain areas etc. Trauma is stored in the body and if that isn’t targeted our nervous system can become very dysregulated.

When our nervous system is dysregulated it can mimic mental health disorders. Mental health illness is a culmination of severe system dysregulation and adaptations/coping skills that were once needed to survive but can’t seem to turn off. When we look at a person with trauma informed care in mind, we can begin to peel back the layers of trauma to get to the root of the first time they may have felt anxious and gain understanding of how it has manifested to what they may struggle with in present day.

Well, my Grandma Barbara had bipolar disorder so does my mom, there’s nothing you can do about that, it’s genes. No. Mental illness is not passed down in the sense of if she had it, you 100% will too. Epigenetics by definition is “the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.”

In other words, it may seem like it’s passed down but it’s learned behavior from your environment. Besides epigenetics and trauma there is one more factor that can mimic psychiatric disorders and that’s nutritional deficiences. “Good nutrition helps one to contain good dopamine and serotonin and other necessary hormonal levels”

Between this and trauma we could come to realize that we aren’t doomed with receiving a diagnosis and that there is hope and a way higher chance of recovery than what we’re told.

With trauma informed therapies like EMDR, Somatic Therapy becoming more popular, we are seeing great success in those who suffer with PTSD and CPTSD, which at one point were thought to be a life long illnesses, which is no longer true.

As someone who struggles with CPTSD and tried years of talk therapy, I can tell you first hand that I’ve been able to heal things within my body that I couldn’t in talk therapy. Talking about trauma can only get you so far, you can intellectually understand your trauma and pain but until you deal with what is stored in your body, you won’t see changes.

I say this with the utmost compassion, what if mental illness isn’t real in the sense it isn’t what we were told it is. Perhaps it’s simpler than we realize like looking at the person and asking about the trauma they went through, looking at the basics of their lifestyle, do they get enough exercise, do they eat/hydrate enough, are they nutritionally or vitamin deficient that could be affecting their body/mood, are their hormones at an optimal level etc.

Imagine if we took this approach versus ticking off symptoms in the DSM.

Imagine how much more hope there would be around mental health and recovering from our trauma & pain.

Imagine how much healthier we would be as a society.