Mental Health is important for everyday functioning in this thing we call life. Mental Health can rapidly turn to Mental Ill-health when there are any one of these adverse factors: diet, exercise, medication therapy and talking therapy. I know, diet and exercise seems to cliché, but they really are important.

1 Diet

We are what we eat – or more accurately, we make ourselves from what we eat. Our digestive system is a wonder of enzymes and microbes that turn our food into different chemicals that we then turn into ourselves (growth, healing and most importantly living). There are some chemicals we cannot make ourselves, and so we need to ensure that we consume enough of those basic building blocks. Sometimes digestive issues can block our ability to absorb these vital building blocks such as gastrointestinal tract ailments, allergies, food restrictions, poverty and Eating Disorders. (Nutrition)

A good therapist can help with some of these, and support your doctor referring to the relevant specialists to manage the biological aspects (eg GI problems, allergies etc).

The most common general dietary problems I see in my clients is low iron, low vitamin C and poor B6. The next most common problem is insufficient nutritional spread (variety) in daily foods. Some of these can be addressed in modifying and improving your diet, some may need more direct medical support (supplements, infusions and or medications).

* don’t take more than 120 mg of Vitamin C without a good doctors reason: the RDI for adults is 45 mg.
* B6 can be problematic when it is either low or high, the goal is to get it in the right range
* It is best practice to get a pathology report form a blood test before adjusting your diet. Ask your GP for one.

2 Exercise

Our bodies evolved in the wild, not the city. For most of us, we need to do a certain amount of exertion in a week to shift from sedentary to fit – that is 2 hours of exertion exercise total in the week. If your job is lifting and moving heavy things, then you are doing exercise as part of work, or if you enjoy tennis with a friend, you are doing exercise right there. Exercise does not require jogging or a gym, but in the absence of natural exercise (things you just do throughout the week), then you may need to manually add in some.

Exercise has a direct effect on your feeling of energy and improvement of body health. Your brain is in your body, it is part of your body – so an unhealthy body is an unhealthy brain. Exercise also has a direct effect on your brain chemistry, generally improving it.

There are many people who find that exercise is beneficial every day, boosting their enjoyment, focus, and ability to sustain tasks. There are a few people who find that exercise just costs, leaving them fatigued and brain drained, in which case an exercise plan should be done in consultation with an expert in your condition (eg chronic fatigue, around 20% of ADHDers, fibromyalgia).

A good therapist will help you understand the process of why exercise is good for you and help you work in automatic fitness in to your daily life without it having to be onerous, or recognise that you are in a category where exercise can be harmful and advise you to seek recommendations from the relevant specialist for your condition.

3 Medication Therapy

Mental illness is a term that is thrown around a great deal for any time someone is acting oddly compared to what we expect. There are two major causes:

• Biological Driven Dysregulation
• Circumstance Driven Discomfort

Most Biologically Driven Dysregulation will require a long term medication.

Temporary Medication can help you manage Circumstance Driven Discomfort. See below under Talking Therapy for a more information on Circumstance Driven Discomfort.

The Point of Medication Therapy

Medication helps your body to work properly, or at the least, less badly. Once we have worked out what the biological driver of your mental health symptoms are, we can start to look for the likely mechanism of how it affects your mental health and try to address that with medication.

I am often asked by clients if there is a non medication method to address the problem that they are having. There are some lifestyle things you can do to make it much worse, and should you be doing those, I’d advise modifying that first.

If you are eating well, do enough exercise, have a good life circumstance and still have mental ill health symptoms, there isn’t a non-medication method to manage this.

4 Talking Therapy

We are more than just biological machines mindlessly reacting to the world. Humans also incorporate thinking to what they do, mindfully acting in the world.

To mindfully act, we need to understand what is going on, what things mean, what consequences things will have and some ability to choose which action is going to be positively effective.

What we are talking about here is knowledge and skills.

Talking Therapies are frameworks to help guide therapists to support you through a situation, and ideally equip you to navigate any future similar situations. Not all Talking Therapies are created equal, and not all therapists are good at it.

If you know what to do to address the problems that you face, and you can and do action them, and that works, then you don’t need therapy.

If you don’t know what to do, or can’t do what you think you should, or those actions are failing to get you good outcomes, then you probably do need therapy.

Therapy helps you:

• Understand
  • Understand the situation that you are in
  • Understand what is fair and reasonable, and thus what is not fair or reasonable
  • Identify missing information
  • Consider the reasonable consequences of actions
  • Get an independent professional reality check
• Learn
  • How to solve problems
  • Acquire new mental / cognitive skills / tools
    • Heuristics (generalised rules sets for most situations)
    • Conflict resolution
• Act
  • Make action plans
  • Implement plans with support
  • Advocacy when needed
  • With a post action review

If your therapist keeps using language you don’t understand, tell them so that they will use language that you do understand.

If your therapist isn’t helping you to understand your situation better, identify what might be going wrong, helping you make plans for how you can make changes and supporting you through doing those actions, you may need to consider getting a therapist that can do that.

Often trauma (lower case) frequently happens to us all, and we generally heal from it without problems.

In reality, Trauma as a cause for mental ill health is rare.

Generally, what we think of as Trauma is actually a Biological Driven Dysregulation or Complex Circumance Driven Discomfort with a trauma (lower case) that isn’t resolving because of those other factors.

Resolve those other factors first, and general life trauma will resolve. If it doesn’t, then you are ready for Trauma Therapy.

Some of these things you might be able to get from friends, but mostly friends aren’t specialised in helping people navigate their unique experiences, and sustain help through complex situations. Sometimes the friends are the exacerbating factor in why things aren’t resolving.

A good therapist will help you navigate your situation and symptoms via Talking Therapies, and be knowledgeable about medications that can help address the common Biological Driven Dysregulations.