Clip here.

[Edit: The speaker is Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. Linked is an interview with a channel I highly recommend, “Nutrition With Judy.”]

I appreciate people who say things very starkly, even if it winds up an exaggeration. What’s confusing about this is that it at first glance appears to negate the countless ways, from severe early childhood trauma, to severe head injuries, people wind up with psychiatric disorders.

Nevertheless, a very foundational truth: Wrecked microbiome, or gut health, lies at the root of infinite suffering in the diagnostic Siberia of “depression” and all its offshoots.

Many of us started trying to heal our gut so many years ago, only to find it elusive and frustrating.

Please feel free to share your gut healing stories in the comments section. And also: You favorite fermentation recipes. Or anything else.

MYHA interviews will start soon, on Zoom, with various health practitioners and healers.

My own health is “a work in progress,” but I’ve come a long way. Detox, health, and healing are not linear for most people, and many of us feel we have fallen into the arms of Venus de Milo enough times and have wanted to QUIT.

Quit trying.

Instead, let’s start really talking about it, and share what we have gleaned.

I suffered incapacitating depression for many years, and feel strongly that I would like to put more of a spotlight on the frankly medieval ways people with “depression” get treated, by everybody, unless they happen to know an actual angel.

The thought that so many of us were instructed to have a better attitude, to “take it to the cross,” to “practice gratitude,” with this invisible, deadly beast upon us adds many layers of trauma to an already great trauma.

I’ve not had most illnesses so maybe have not earned to the right to declare “depression” the worst of them all, but I would not wish it upon my worst enemy.

And I will never stop trying to crack the code, or protect the afflicted from all the pious ignorance that surrounds their plight.

You are, for one thing, not a bad Christian if you struggle with depression, though prayer can, especially in true desperation, create a connection to God so you can hear his instructions. These kinds of things have happened to me.

You are not self absorbed, nor ungrateful, nor dark spirited by nature, if you are afflicted by “depression.”

Something is wrong—neurotransmitters are not doing what they should. The simplest things that “normal” people do every day is all but impossible for you.

I really understand.

I intend to create shame free spaces to discuss these things, and compare notes.

Dmitri Shostakovich, in keeping with his highly attuned nature, did not fail to see what his friend was enduring:

“Because if the fear grows, it can lead to a total collapse of the personality.”

Thank you.

For this reader, truer, more rare words were never spoken.

Where I disagree with the notion that all psychiatric disorders stem from broken gut, I second Shostakovich’s very astute observation: Overwhelming fear, over many years, leads to a total personality collapse, by cortisol flood.

That’s what happened to me.

Once a brain crashes, it takes years and years and years to re-build it.

This will be one of our themes going forward.

PS. How those Stalin era Russians held onto any dopamine at all is a genuine mystery.

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