TREATMENT FOR DEPRESSION AND INSOMNIA

Today we’re interrupting the regularly scheduled Lyme-related solipsism on this blog. Instead I’m going to write about a non-pharmaceutical treatment for depression and insomnia that is amazingly effective. It’s called the Neurotransmitter Program made by CHK Nutrition.

This entry is not an infomercial. No one is paying me to write this.

Two years ago The Poet was extremely depressed. He woke up in the morning and cried for an hour, he worried that he would lose his job and wind up homeless. Any discussion about our future immediately reverted back to tragedies he’d been through with other people that he assumed inevitably he and I would repeat.

When things hit bottom for him, he finally listened to my suggestion and went to Carolyn Humphreys to try the Neurotransmitter Program. Within days he was feeling better. Over the next year, under Carolyn’s supervision, he continued on the Neurotransmitter supplements. A year ago he stopped taking them, and his depression has not returned. A few years ago he could have easily spent an hour crying before he left for work. This morning he spent that time talking about Borges and teasing me about my recent mishaps trying to learn swing dance air moves.

But wait—there’s more! Carolyn had mentioned that the Neurotransmitters help with insomnia as well as depression, so I told my friend Maggie about them. For six months she’d had terrible insomnia and had gone to countless doctors and tried everything she could. Still, she was sleeping only four hours a night, could barely function and was worried she might lose her job because of it. She started sleeping well again on the neurotransmitters. She continued the program over the next 18 months, and also followed up with Carolyn with treatments to bolster her overall health.

Maggie saw Carolyn for the last time in March or April, and she has been sleeping well ever since. Occasionally, when she’s under a lot of stress from work, she might sleep only six or seven hours for one night, but her sleep goes right back to normal after that.

How does it work?

Depression and insomnia are both caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain: a lack of neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters get depleted over time for lots of reasons, prescription medication being one of the biggest causes. (Pharmaceuticals can be great when you need them, but your liver has to work overtime to process them, and that drains you of nutrients.)

So listen up! Antidepressants might be a temporary fix, but they don’t address the root cause of depression, in fact, they might make it worse. (The Poet himself had been on antidepressants before I met him.) Only your brain can make neurotransmitters, but it needs the right ingredients to make them. The CHK Nutrition program gives your body the amino acids and vitamins that your brain needs to start feeling better.

The only way to take these supplements is through a health care professional. If you live in San Diego and think this might benefit you or someone you know, run, don’t walk, to Carolyn Humphreys. If you are elsewhere, my suggestion is to look at CHK Nutrition for their phone number, call them up and ask them for a list of practitioners near you who use this program.

The Neurotransmitter Program takes commitment. You will have to take urine tests (you do them at home and mail them in) so the program can be tailored exactly for your body’s needs, and you most likely will need to take supplements four times a day until your brain chemistry is balanced again—this is months, not days or weeks. It’s worth it.

If you find a good practitioner, he or she will also check to see if there are any underlying health issues that might be contributing to depletion of neurotransmitters. For example, in The Poet’s case it turned out he had a low grade intestinal infection and also super-low Vitamin D levels. Once he took care of those things, his happiness set point climbed even higher.

I am not a doctor, any quasi-medical explanations in this post are based on my unscientific, lay-person’s knowledge of human biochemistry.