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Also included on the site is an array of articles on topics ranging from the medical causes of schizophrenia to the effects of toxic metals on mental health.

Special AlternativeMentalHealth.com T-shirts and bumper stickers are available at our online store.

A bookstore page lists top books that cover many areas of alternative treatments with titles like Natural Healing for Schizophrenia and Other Common Mental Disorders and No More Ritalin.

AlternativeMentalHealth.com has been created to educate the public, practitioners, and government officials on the medical conditions that create "mental illness" and the many safe resources available for addressing and often curing severe mental symptoms.

October 22, 2003, was a great day for Canadians - and for the rest of the world as well.

For those who may not know, the Synergy Group (www.truehope.com) has been embroiled in a fierce battle with Canadian health authorities over the company's right to distribute a nutritional product that has been reported in medical journals as effective in taking 70% of bipolar patients off of medication.

After having their offices raided by Canadian officials and having all manner of attack on their integrity and corporate status, the Synergy folks and many of their clients took the war to the highest body in the land - the Canadian Parliament. The melee got so circus-like that at one point, 9 women with red umbrellas - all claiming mental health recovery thanks to the Synergy supplement - made their protests known on the parliamentary steps (see www.redumbrellas.ca).

What happened? They won! Parliament revised the country's Food and Drug Act to allow the distribution of the supplement.

It is often amazing at the work and struggle that has had to take place for people to get their doctors and governments to listen to the common sense of using nutrients as an alternative to drugs.

Our thanks to all in Canada who got their government's attention. They have shown what a handful of determined people can do when their health is at stake. We are a better world because of it.

In a study from Poland, children with ADHD were been found to more deficient than controls in a selected number of bio elements. Magnesium deficiencies were the most pronounced difference. Magnesium supplementation in the ADHD children decreased their hyperactivity.

In a study from England, there was a strong association for more disturbed and excitable patients to have abnormal (either high or low) Mg levels. The authors thought that the patients who seemed most disturbed may have some abnormality of Mg metabolism.

Magnesium deficiency causes increased levels of adrenaline, which can lead to a feeling of anxiety. Rats who become magnesium deficient have an increased level of urinary catecholamine excretion (a by-product of adrenaline).

People who have mitral valve prolapse (a heart condition) have also been found to have an increased state of anxiety and have an increased level of urinary catecholamine excretion, the exact same condition found in rats who are Mg deficient.

It is not surprising then, to find that people with mitral valve prolapse are usually low in magnesium, and that magnesium supplementation alleviates the symptoms of mitral valve prolapse and reduces the level of urinary catecholamine excretion, i.e. it also reduces the anxiety symptoms.

Researchers in Spain found a correlation between anxiety disorders and hyper mobility. In fact, they found that patients with anxiety disorder were over 16 times more likely than control subjects to have joint laxity (looseness). If you put the study results together, then there's a link between anxiety and hyper mobility, a link between anxiety and mitral valve prolapse, and a link between mitral valve prolapse and hyper mobility.

A study in Bulgaria also found magnesium abnormalities in patients with schizophrenia and depression. The authors thought the schizophrenia and depression caused the magnesium deficiencies, but I disagree that that was necessarily the case. When you look at this study within the context of all the other studies mentioned in this section, it is more likely that the magnesium abnormalities caused the mental illness. (There are quite a few studies on magnesium and mental illness on Medline. I just included a few to highlight my points.)

In a study from England, there was a strong association for more disturbed and excitable patients to have abnormal (either high or low) magnesium levels. The authors thought that the patients who seemed most disturbed may have some abnormality of magnesium metabolism.

–Wolfgang Stöger, Germany

Kassidi Bishop grew to love basketball at a young age. She got her first college recruiting letter when she was in the fifth grade. With her father coaching her on an elite AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) team, The Force, she became one of the best young players in the nation. She averaged 12.3 points per game as a freshman and 17.1 points as a 5-foot-10 sophomore who could play any position. One magazine picked her as a preseason honorable mention All-America her junior season.

But Kassidi's life was disrupted dramatically when, at the age of sixteen, she underwent a severe personality change, manifesting the irrational highs and lows often called bipolar disorder. Hospitalization, psychotropic drugs, and several suicide attempts followed.

Struggling from that point forward, Kassidi found she could not compete at a collegiate level with psychiatric drugs in her system. Through a California psychiatrist, she began to take a nutritional supplement (www.truehope.com) that had been reported as successful for bipolar symptoms.

Soon she was not only playing collegiate level basketball, but was nominated for Comeback Player of the Year. Nearly five years later now, she has not had a recurrence of her bipolar symptoms. Her family now markets a broadscale supplement that has worked for Kassidi at www.quietminds.us and (303) 794-5672. 

In our April 2003 issue, our writer Dana Barnes reported on a survey of 145 Wisconsin teachers, revealing their often abysmal ignorance of current research on ADHD symptoms and the side effects of treatment (TEACHERS CONFUSED ABOUT “ADHD”, Alternative Mental Health News, Issue 33).

New research conducted in the greater Washington, DC area adds evidence that teachers and other school personnel are often the first to suggest the diagnosis of ADHD. (Leonard Sax, MD, PhD, and Kathleen J. Kautz, RN, BSN, posted 10/20/2003 on www.medscape.com’s “Annals of Family Medicine.”)

Physicians in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area responded to the question, "Who first suggests the diagnosis of ADHD?" by assigning percentages to primary care physicians, consultants, parents, teachers, etc.

Teachers were most likely to be first to suggest the diagnosis of ADHD (46.4%), followed by parents (30.2%), primary care physicians (11.3%), school personnel other than teachers (6.0%), and consultants such as child psychiatrists or psychologists (3.1%).

For girls, the number of ADHD-related office visits increased threefold between the beginning of 1990 and the end of 1998; for boys, the increase was 2.2X over the same period.

“Regional variations in the prescribing of medication for ADHD may be caused at least in part by variations in the likelihood of a teacher suggesting the diagnosis of ADHD,” conclude the authors.

“Some authors have questioned whether all children receiving medication for ADHD actually meet standard diagnostic criteria for ADHD. One study of students in North Carolina found that only 43% of students taking medication for ADHD met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM-III-R) criteria for ADHD.”

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Fluoxetine, the active ingredient in Prozac, has reportedly been found in the tissue of the freshwater blue gill fish in Lake Lewisville, northwest of Dallas, Texas.

The study by Bryan Brooks, a Baylor University toxicologist, was reported by Reuters in October. Brooks will present his findings in Seattle at a November conference of the Geological Society of America.

The fluoxetine probably enters the sewer system from users' toilets and is not filtered out by the waste water treatment plant en route to a river that feeds the lake.

The toxicologist has responded to humorous speculation about whether Prozac makes the fish happy by saying their exposure is below "therapeutic levels." The extent of the danger to aquatic life - and to humans, through their consumption or otherwise - has not yet been assessed.

Brooks is studying how current exposure might affect the ability of the fish to find food, fight off predators and find a mate.

Celiac Disease is an intolerance to "gluten," a protein complex found in wheat and other grains. Persons with Celiac Disease (known as celiacs) experience a wide range of physical and emotional problems when they eat such grain products.

A woman named Betty, a contributor to a celiac-related email list, posted a question about behavior and gluten and has summarized the 47 responses as follows:

All respondents said they or their children experienced behavior changes after ingesting gluten, including moodiness, tearfulness, hopelessness, anger, rage, and hallucinations. Some described immediate effects that lasted only a day. The majority suggested effects of 3-5 days. A few said two weeks or a month.

Summary of behaviors noted:
    anger or rage:  14
    agression:  5
    ADD symptoms:  13
    depression:  7
    grumpiness:  2
    moodiness:  7
    hallucinations:  3

One response was from someone who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia before celiac. A few others described visual and auditory hallucinations (symptoms used in diagnosing schizophrenia).

"While my daughter is not hallucinating (that I know of)," writes Betty, "I am concerned that the medical system is not equipped to recognize hallucinations as a symptom of celiac and order celiac screening for person who is hallucinating. I know that there are many people who are misdiagnosed with a myriad of physical health issues before getting a celiac diagnosis, but people who get diagnosed with mental illness often have other problems ignored. Treatment of mental illness is typically completely isolated from other health problems."

The Times Online reports (October 20, 2003) that antidepressant prescription and use - unwarranted in many cases - costs Britain's National Health Service £380 million per year, prompting heightened scrutiny by the government of what it is actually paying for.

Antidepressants have been handed out "like sweets," says the article by Oliver Wright, health correspondent to The Times. "The antidepressant Zispin was made available this month in an orange-flavoured version that melts in the mouth...Britain is becoming a nation kept artificially happy by pills."

"Artificially happy" is, at best, an optimistic description of the 15 million British subjects prescribed antidepressants each year:

"Recent trials showed almost no clinical difference between antidepressants and placebos in the treatment of mild depression," Wright reported.

The government has adopted the stance that antidepressants should no longer be used as a first-line treatment for the "normal problems of life."

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the government agency that decides which drugs should be available on the NHS, says in new recommendations that people with mild depression often respond to simple interventions, such as exercise or self-help.  

New research suggests that depression can affect the immune system in older people.

In a new study by Glaser, Robles, Sheridan, et al., people who reported even a few symptoms of depression had higher levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), an immune-system protein that promotes inflammation. This protein has been associated with a variety of age-related ills, including heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and some cancers.

Glaser's team compared 47 people who were present or past caregivers for a spouse with dementia and 72 similarly aged people who had never been a caregiver.

Participants answered questions about symptoms of depression, and the researchers measured levels of IL-6 in blood samples taken before and after the participants had a flu shot.

People who had more symptoms of depression -- but who were not necessarily clinically depressed -- had higher levels of IL-6 before and after a flu shot than people with fewer symptoms, the investigators reported.

Caregiving can take a heavy emotional toll, said Glaser, who pointed out that another study found that caregivers had a 60-percent higher death rate than non-caregivers.

Glaser noted that getting enough sleep and exercise and not smoking or overeating can go a long way toward keeping IL-6 levels under control.

("Mild Depressive Symptoms Are Associated With Amplified and Prolonged Inflammatory Responses After Influenza Virus Vaccination in Older Adults," Archives of General Psychiatry, October 2003.)