Suicide and Antidepressants (SSRI’s); Rooting Out the Cause From a Homeopathic Perspective

By amcquinn July 31, 2018 Iatrogenesis, Materia Medica, Syphilinum No Comments

In the Allopathic realm, debate persists on whether some antidepressant drugs (ADs), in particular the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), cause the emergence or worsening of suicidal ideation in “vulnerable patients”. Across the globe, ADs, especially SSRIs, are among the most commonly prescribed medications (Stafford, 2001[26]). However, it is still suggested that you use them anyway?!

See this excerpt from PMC, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health as an example:

“The documented efficacy and long-term benefit of antidepressants in patients with recurrent forms of severe anxiety or depressive disorders support their use in those individuals with these disorders, who experience suicidal thoughts or behavior. In general, it is assumed that antidepressants are beneficial for all symptoms of depression, including suicidality. However, some evidence suggests that Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors [SSRIs] may cause worsening of suicidal ideas in vulnerable patients. Systematic reviews and pooled analysis of experimental, observational, and epidemiological studies have investigated the use of SSRIs and their association with suicidality. Taking account of the methodological limitations of these studies, the current evidence fails to provide a clear relationship between their use and risk of suicidality in adults. However, in children and adolescents, there appears to be a bit of increased risk of suicidal ideations and attempts, but not of completed suicides. This risk can be anticipated and managed clinically. Clinicians are, therefore, advised to maintain a close follow-up during the initial treatment periods and remain vigilant of this risk. This advisory, however, should not deter clinicians from the use of effective dosages of antidepressants for a sufficient period of time, in every age group of patients, when clinically needed, and if found suitable otherwise.”

Large amounts of these prescriptions are written by Physicians because of the perception that they are largely safe and effective across a wide variety of common disorders, namely depression and anxiety disorders. Concerns related to safety were initially raised in the early 1990s, with reports that described a possible association with suicidality (Teicher et al., 1990[28]), and from time to time later (Healy, 2004[11]). Although, there are plenty of red flags and news articles citing SSRI’s contributing to violence and suicides, why are they still being administered?!

Justin Karter cites, “The “new generation” antidepressants, SSRIs and SNRIs, appeared in the 1980s but, according to the reviewers, “their adverse effects and clinical trial data have not been fully disclosed.” In 2004, the FDA published a public health advisory warning of worsening depression and suicidality in some patients being treated with antidepressants. In 2007, a Black Box suicide warning was extended from just teenagers and suggested monitoring all patients up to age 24 for anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, hostility, impulsivity, and akathisia.”

Recent findings indicate an increased risk for violent crime in young adults taking antidepressants and a groundbreaking reanalysis of the infamous “Study 329.” This study reports on the effects of Paxil on teens finding a heightened risk for suicide that was not initially disclosed by the drug companies. Wait, what?!

The authors of this report cite that “genetic variations in metabolism” affect how individuals react to antidepressants and that research indicated that “ultra-rapid metabolizers” may be at an increased risk for changes in behavior. Nowhere, though, do they explain what to do about these “genetic variations in metabolism.”

We know that part of the problem lies in suppressing the symptoms under a drug that doesn’t have the capacity to be curative. In our world, we liken it to putting a bandaid on an elephant’s hiney. Under the suppressive action of the drug is a volcano of content that has not been addressed. Just because the symptoms are suppressed, doesn’t mean the underlying issue has been addressed. It’s an illusion – take the drug away and all the content below the iatrogenesis comes cascading back, sometimes even worse.

In the world of Heilkunst Medicine, we speak to the fact that medicine, all medicine, only has three possible actions; suppressive, palliative or curative. There exists in nature only one law of cure, and that is like cures like. This isn’t because I’ve practice homeopathic law in my clinic everyday for the last 16 years. It’s a primal fact, very much like gravity. You and I are both subject to those laws too, not just some of the time, but every single nano second of the day. The law of cure, also, never takes a day off.

I’ve had quite a bit of experience with suicidal folk in my day. I’ve served teenagers who’ve held my hands in consultation whispering through their racking tears that they no longer want to be here. My own son went through a period for several months playing video games in his bedroom citing that life was devoid of joy and that he was contemplating an exit strategy.

I had my own stomach pumped at the hospital at the age of sixteen from pills I’d taken from the medicine cabinet of a friend’s Mom that landed me in years of ineffective talk therapy, circling around the roots of my abandonment and despair. My own mother committed suicide when I was eight years of age by turning on the car in an enclosed garage. It took me decades of trying to recover until I came to this system of medicine.

When I hear that yet another actor has taken their life, it has a deep impact at the core of my being where I see pencil marks crossing off groups of five incidences and counting. I’m amazed at how often the phenomenon of wanting to die shows up on my patient’s traumatic timelines.

There is another aspect of of this very challenging matrix. First of all, no parent, daughter, son, sibling or clinician alive can convince another person that they want to be here. With my own son, I let him know that I was deeply saddened to hear he was suffering, but that I totally understood if he wanted to leave. I let him know that only he, ultimately could make the choice to be here. Jordan had also suffered vaccine damage and ASD shortly after birth. (Listen to our FREE audiobook for more on this.)

Life is hard, and if it is to be truly lived, it has to be lived on our own primal terms. We’re given life, as a gift from our first breath, however, at some point (or various points) in our life, we have to make the decision to wholly receive that gift.

It must come from the very crux of one’s volition; a free choice, out of the deepest essence of our being. Most folks don’t realize in their depth of their despair, that the full embodied choice to be, beyond the genetic and environmental disease matrix, is a sweetness so profound it is stunning how and why we suffered so prior.

For me, I wished on my birthday candles every year for just a semblance of “Peace.” At the very least, doesn’t a human being deserve this bit of grace, otherwise, what’s the purpose of observing a sunrise over the horizon of the ocean, or a phosphorescent firefly in the fog, or the kiss of someone you love beyond all measure? Why do we even feel pride when we create something luscious or simply help a friend?

As a Heilkunst Physician, I began my practice with a small plethora of folks suffering a lack of inner value, prone to insidious self-destructive tendencies. Our patients will often bring to us that which we’ve addressed within ourselves. It’s called karma … but the good kind.

Alice Miller writes,

“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body,

and although we can repress it,

we can never alter it.

Our intellect can be deceived,

our feelings manipulated,

and conceptions confused,

and our body tricked with medication.

But someday our body will present its bill,

for it is as incorruptible as a child,

who, still whole in spirit,

will accept no compromises or excuses,

and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.”

As mentioned above, certain patients are more susceptible, “vulnerable” and require greater compassion, care, and “vigilance” at the onset by the therapist. Unfortunately drugging a person doesn’t ever answer why they suffer “genetic variations in metabolism.” I watched my own grandmother, my mother’s mom, numbed to near vertical catatonia. Her robotic, “Yes, Dear,” never reached her eyes.

So what can be done using the curative principles of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann’s Heilkunst? First, we acknowledge the patient’s state of mind. Then we go after the contributing aspects of nutrition. Often these individuals are suffering a heavy load of parasites and gut bacteria that they’ve been hosting for some time.

Many times there is history of heavy metals and vaccine damage that needs to follow proven protocols of detoxification. You have to know what you’re doing in this realm as each individual is different so you need to stabilize the patient before you start pulling therapeutic lynch pins.

We also secure their medical history with a four page intake form also outlining their family’s history so that we can get a handle on what is coming down their family line of inherited Genetic Miasms. This is like having the keys to that individual’s kingdom with regards to their “genetic variations in metabolism.”

Quite often with these patients, you’ll see a strong, inherited, predisposition to the chronic disease, Syphilis. You’ll see a history of a fear of germs, hyper vigilance, fears, terrors that are much worse at night, growing pains, OCD (did I lock the door, turn off the stove or curling iron?), chronic hand-washing, tendencies to chronic cannabis use, alcoholism, and schizophrenia.

Next, we ask for their emotional and physical timeline. These are the plotted traumas of their past from the present back to their birth illustrating the emotional and physical shocks and traumas sustained during their lifetime. It becomes the spine for Heilkunst treatment enabling us to homeopathically address their accumulated traumas sequentially from the present right back to their vaccines and their birth. That, then, opens the gateway to the the eight Genetic Miasms.

You may be thinking, if someone is suicidal, you can’t waste time addressing their diet and their sequential timeline while they’re acutely suffering in the present. You’re absolutely right. With dropper bottles for Emotional Support (feelings) and Drainage/Detox/Organ Support (physical/metabolic) we will include some of the following remedies to lap away at the state of mind and physical symptoms affecting the patient in the present:

Mercurius:

Mind.?Great anguish, restlessness (is constantly changing from place to place), and agitation, with fear of losing the reason, or with excessive internal torment, principally in evening, or in bed at night, as if conscious of having committed some crime.?(Post-partum mania; wants to throw child on fire.).?Inclined to sopor, coma.?Moral dejection, with great listlessness, discouragement, dread of labour, and disgust to life.?Great indifference to everything.?Does not even care to eat.?Apprehensions.?Desire to flee with nightly anxiety and apprehensions.?Ill-humour, disposition to be angry, and to fly into a passion, great susceptibility, humour quarrelsome, mistrustful, and suspicious.?Moroseness and repugnance to conversation.?Groans.?Continuous moaning and groaning.?Excitement, and great moral irritability, with a tendency to be easily frightened.?Bad effects from fright, leaving one in a state of great anxiety and < at night.?Home-sickness with nightly anxiety and perspiration.?Distraction, inadvertence, difficulty of conception.?Entire-unfitness for meditation, and tendency to make mistakes while speaking.?Answers questions slowly.?Weakness of memory; and will-power lost.?Instability of ideas, which constantly drive away each other.?Raving.?Delirium; mental derangement of drunkards.?Intellect weak; imbecile.?Low muttering delirium.?Fits of mania or dementia, with disposition to shed tears.?Hurried and rapid speech.?Loss of consciousness and of speech.?Fury, with dread of liquids. (Source: http://homeoint.org/clarke/m/merc.htm)

Alumina:

Mind.?Humour morose, sad, with despair of cure.?Involuntary tears.?Anguish and anxiety as if one were threatened with some fatal accident, or had committed some crime.?Time passes too slowly; intolerable ennui; an hour seems half a day.?Seeing blood on a knife she has horrid ideas of killing herself, though she abhors the idea.?Apprehensions.?Disposition to be frightened.?Air sorrowful and morose.?Ill-humour, with unfitness for labour.?Disposition to be angry.?Obstinate, and contradictory humour.?Taking everything in bad part.?Humour changeable; at one time bold, at another timid.?Weakness of memory.?Distraction, inadvertence, and incapability of following up an idea.?Absence of ideas.?Blunders in speaking.?Great vivacity of apprehension, alternately with inadvertence, and deprivation of sight and hearing.?Sensation, as if self-consciousness were outside the body. (Source: http://homeoint.org/clarke/a/alm.htm)

Aurum Metallicum:

Mind.?Melancholy, with inquietude and desire to die.?Irresistible impulse to weep.?Longing to see one’s relations, resembling nostalgia.?Imagines he has lost the affection of his friends; this makes him weep.?Sees obstacles everywhere.?Hopeless.?Suicidal; desperate; inclined to jump off heights; to dash himself into a chair.?Sad, feels that all is against her and life is not desirable, and the thought of death alone gives pleasure.?Great anguish, which even induces a disposition to suicide, with cramp-like contractions in the abdomen.?Excessive scruples of conscience.?Despair of oneself, and of others.?Ill-humour and aversion to conversation.?Grumbling, quarrelsome humour.?The least contradiction excites his wrath.?Alternate peevishness and cheerfulness.?Anger and passion.?Alternation of gaiety, or of irritability with melancholy.?Hypochondriacal humour.?Weakness of the intellectual faculties.?Weakness of the memory. (Source: http://homeoint.org/clarke/a/aur.htm)

Arsenicum:

Mind.?Melancholy, sometimes of a religious character, sadness, care, chagrin, cries and complaints.?Anguish, driving one out of bed at night, and from one place to another in the daytime.?Restlessness.?Great fear of being left alone.?Anger, with anxiety, restlessness and sensation of coldness.?Anxiety, restlessness, and excessive anguish which allows no rest, principally in the evening in bed, or in the morning on waking, and often with trembling, cold sweat, oppression of the chest, difficulty of breathing, and fainting fits.?Anxiety of conscience, as if a crime had been committed.?Inconsolable anguish, with complaints and lamentation.?Hypochondriacal humour, with restlessness and anxiety.?Fear of solitude, of spectres, and of robbers, with desire to hide oneself.?Indecision and changeable humour, which demands this at one time, that at another, and rejects everything after having obtained it.?Despair; he finds no rest, esp. at night, with anguish.?Despondency, despair, weariness of life, inclination to suicide, or excessive fear of death, which is sometimes believed to be very near.?Too great sensibility and scrupulousness of conscience, with gloomy ideas, as if one had offended all the world.?Ill-humour, impatience, vexation, inclination to be angry, repugnance to conversation, inclination to criticise, and great susceptibility.?Caustic and jesting spirit.?Extreme sensibility of all the organs; all noise, conversation, and clear lights are insupportable.?Great apathy and indifference.?Great weakness of memory.?Stupidity and dulness.?Delirium.?Delirium, with great flow of ideas.?Loss of consciousness, and of sensation; dotage; maniacal actions and frenzy.?Madness; loss of mind (from the abuse of alcoholic drinks). (Source: http://www.homeoint.org/clarke/a/ars.htm)

Kali Bromatum:

Mind.?Unconscious of what is occurring around them; cannot recognise, nor be comforted by, their friends.?Memory absolutely destroyed; anæmia; emaciation.?Loss of memory; had to be told the word before he could speak it (amnesic aphasia).?Inability to express oneself.?Writing almost unintelligible from omission of words or parts of words; words repeated or misplaced.?Mentally dull, torpid; perception slow, answers slowly.?Benumbed sensation of brain.?Fearful, apprehensive mood; imagines he cannot pass a certain point.?Drowsiness.?Fears to be alone.?Frightful imaginings at night (in pregnant women during later months), they are under impression that they have committed, or are about to commit, some great crime and cruelty, such as murdering their children or husbands.?Hallucinations of sight and sound, with or without mania, precede brain and paralytic symptoms.?Delirium, with delusions; thinks he is pursued; will be poisoned; is selected for Divine vengeance; that her child is dead, &c.?Delirium tremens, in first or irritative stage; face flushed; eyes red; delirium active; horrid illusions; hard, quick pulse.?Puerperal mania, with fulness of blood-vessels of brain.?Hands constantly busy; all sorts of fearful delusions; walks the room groaning, bemoaning his fate; full of fear; unsteady.?Fits of uncontrollable weeping and profound melancholic delusions.?Feeling of lightness and exhilaration in place of heaviness and depression.?Depressed; low-spirited; has nervous anxiety.?Profound melancholic depression, with religious delusions and feeling of moral deficiency; frequent shedding of tears, low-spirited and childish, giving way to her feelings; profound indifference and almost disgust for life (melancholia).?Profound melancholy from anæmia.?Night terrors of children (not from indigestion), with screaming in sleep, trembling, unconsciousness of what is around them; cannot recognise, nor be comforted by, their friends; sometimes followed by squinting. (Source: http://homeoint.org/clarke/k/kali_bro.htm)

Syphilinum:

Mind.?Loss of memory (n).?Loses remembrances of passing occurrences, names, dates, &c., while all occurrences previous to inception of disease are remembered as distinctly as ever (n).?Very nervous, weeping without cause.?Cross, irritable, peevish.?Irritable, excited, walking much of the time, does not want to be soothed, violent on being opposed, has tremors, seems on the verge of convulsions, dazed, absent-minded, always washing her hands.?Periodical neuralgia in head (neuralgia).?Very despondent, does not think will ever get better (s.s.).?Terrible dread of night; always < as night approaches; leaves her about daylight, which she prays for (spring cough).?Feeling as if going insane, or about to be paralysed.?A far-away feeling, with apathy and indifference to future.?Crying infants, who begin immediately after birth. (http://homeoint.org/clarke/s/syph.htm)

Bach’s Rescue Remedy:

Rescue Remedy is a combination of five of the original Bach Flower Remedies which are especially beneficial when you find yourself in traumatic situations, such as, stress, emergencies, after getting bad news, before an exam or job interview and all other kind of situations where we suddenly lose balance mentally. The Remedies quickly get us back in our normal balance so that we calmly can deal with any situation

Impatiens: For those who act and think quickly, and have no patience for what they see as the slowness of others. They often prefer to work alone. Teaches empathy and understanding of and patience with others. We’ve found it very fast-acting in alleviating an impatient attitude and lowering stress.

Star of Bethlehem: For trauma and shock, whether experienced recently or in the past. Teaches the ability to recover from traumas and to integrate them into the present life.

Cherry Plum: For those who fear losing control of their thoughts and actions and doing things they know are bad for them or which they consider wrong. Teaches trust in one’s spontaneous wisdom and the courage to follow one’s path.

Rock Rose: For situations in which one experiences panic or terror.

Clematis: For those who find their lives unhappy and withdraw into fantasy worlds. They are ungrounded and indifferent to the details of everyday life. Teaches one to establish a bridge between the physical world and the world of ideas; may foster great creativity. Is also used to bring clarity and alertness to the present moment. (Source: http://www.directlyfromnature.com/Original_Bach_RESCUE_Remedy_s/1814.htm)

Thankfully my adult son is whole, sound, healthy in both mind and body. He’s also loving his life on his own terms. I am beyond proud of him. We’ve both worked really hard to overcome what our parents and grandparents bestowed to us genetically.

While it’s not been easy navigating these disease matrices, it’s been utterly worth it. I’ve totally gotten to know my self and my very gruesome roots. It’s been the scaffolding from which I’ve built my practice, giving back what I’ve learned to others both experientially and through the portal of Heilkunst principles. For me, deciding to stay has been utterly worth it.