You Are What You Eat - And Sleep and Drink and Exercise ....

(Updated July 26, 2000)

You probably never heard your mother tell you this before: "Now, Junior, eat your green leafy vegetables. They're good for your serotonin and dopamine. Norepinephrines, too."

It seems those neurotransmitters in the brain - the ones responsible for whether you feel up or down - respond to more than just medication. The choices you make in lifestyle, it turns out, can have an enormous impact on your mental well-being, which can be both good news and bad: Good in the sense that eating right and living right can heavily stack the odds for recovery (and staying that way) in your favor. Bad in that those suffering from depression tend to find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle that works against establishing good habits of any kind.

To briefly recap the odds: The medication you are on holds out about a 70 percent chance of recovery, a figure inflated by counting partial recoveries as successes and that does not take into account a fifty percent relapse rate (in the SSRI class of antidepressants). These figures may be off-set by those who quit on their medications before they get a chance to work.

Fine. You vow to take your medications religiously. Then what?

First and most obvious is to severely limit - if not totally restrict - alcohol consumption. Virtually all medications come with a clear warning not to use alcohol. After all, alcohol is a depressant, which works against the goal of an ANTIdepressant.

Unfortunately for many depressives, alcohol has been the medication of first choice. And now these same people have no choice. They are stuck. They simply can't quit. If you fall into this class, I am going to make one assumption: by the simple act of reading this, you have expressed your desire to be healed. Please do not underestimate the significance in this important first step. There are many programs that can help you. Check out the list of support web sites listed on this page. Then go to the Recovery page on this Suite 101 site and check out the sites for those who want to quit drinking.

What goes for alcohol also applies to other drugs, legal and illegal. Cutting back on caffeine and nicotine is not such a bad idea, either. Unfortunately, depressives make up a large percentage of abusers, so for many this is much easier said than done. What I said up above also applies here.

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