My Family’s Story: Nutrition, Mental Illness & Chronic Pain

In the coming weeks, I’ll be venturing beyond the recipes, beyond the food philosophy of Nourished Kitchen.  I’ll be sharing my family’s history and the way real, traditional foods and the grace of having found the Weston A Price Foundation has helped us in a very personal way.  These are stories that need to be told – stories of recovery.  I’ve been wary to share them – nervous even, as though I’d lay bare my soul, my secrets and, of course, my privacy.  But, as I wrote earlier, these are stories than need telling.  Today, I’m sharing my husband’s story: a story of mental illness, of chronic pain and of recovery through real food.   In future week’s we’ll cover my story, too, and the renewal we found in our son’s health.

It’s my hope that our recovery gives you hope.

My Husband’s Story

I love my husband.  I love him with every fiber of my being.  He is a brilliant man with a scientific mind that leaves me breathless.  Late in the evenings, as I lay sleepily next to him, I’ll ask him to read to me from his books or to explain the intricate philosophies of particle physics, astronomy, chemistry and cosmology.  It’s not long before he’s lulled me to sleep, for mine is not a scientific mind.  He’s compassionate, too, with a fervent love of food activism and service that compels us both to better ourselves and our community. I tell him that I love him for his activism.

He has also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder – a mental illness characterized by roller coaster fits of oscillating depression and mania.  At its worst, his episodes of mania were complicated further by psychotic breaks, meaning his nervous system and neurotransmitters were short circuiting resulting in severely disconnected thoughts and behaviors.

It’s a scary thing, mental illness, and it is so ill understood.  He suffered from episodes that increased in severity from his late teens to his early twenties – landing him in mental hospitals with increasingly long stays each time.  Doctors tried him on antipsychotics and anticonvulsants – each more experimental than the last.  His young body, challenged by the chemicals, suffered; even more, his brilliant mind suffered, too.

I met him while I was attending college, and we fell in love – passionately.  A few years after dating, we moved in together.  I remember the early days of our love – resting in front of the fire on fearsomely cold nights, snowshoeing near Gothic, lazing in bed well past noon on Saturdays.  It was a lovely time.

Fighting with Bipolar Disorder

After about a year living together, my husband visited his ailing grandparents with his father, a man with observably toxic, narcissistic and passive aggressive traits.  My husband returned transformed.  Sure, it was a stressful visit, but there was an underlying current to his behavior and attitudes that left me deeply concerned.  He started losing sleep, staying up later and later each evening.  He stopped eating regularly and while we adhered to a more or less whole foods diet which was decidedly better than the highly processed super market and fast food based diet that represented much of his early life’s nourishment, it lacked the emphasis on the particularly important nutrients presented by the Weston A Price Foundation dietary guidelines.

Soon the moody fits and sleepless nights devolved into the classic symptoms of a psychotic break. The remarkable and strange behaviors were certainly out of the spectrum of the average routine and a sign of an imbalanced mental status. He never slept and what food he did eat was sparse at best.  His condition deteriorated quickly and I did my best to get him the psychiatric help he needed.  When you live in the rural mountains of Colorado, that help is limited and severely under-qualified at best.

Before long, I was the only person he trusted as his nervous system was under considerable strain and he suffered from paranoid delusions.  Any unfamiliar stimulus became another burden of magnitude for his overtaxed nervous system to withstand.

The local counselors and psychiatric nurses offered little help.  As insistent as they were about placing him in a mental hospital again, I was doubly insistent that he remain at home with me.  I knew, from what he had shared with me in the past, that another treatment by the state mental health system would only traumatize him further and utterly fall short of effective healing.  I made the commitment to him to see him through his illness and into full recovery.  The nurse gave him medication that, at the very least, helped to minimize the paranoia and delusions, enabling him to actually rest while I provided him with deeply nourishing meals, lots of salmon, fresh vegetables with no processed foods.  Between medication, rest and good food the episode subsided and he began his recovery.

Recovery from Bipolar Disorder

The medication the psychiatric nurse provided to my husband helped him to recover, providing that jolt of chemical compounds that ended his episode and we were told that he would need to remain on the medication for the rest of his life.  That is a burdening prospect when you are in your early twenties.  The medication also left him nearly immobilized: he couldn’t think as he used to do, he was lethargic and could never get enough sleep, his body was weak and dizzy, and he suffered chronic headaches and other side effects too.  We were fortunate that tardive dyskinesia never reared its head, but the longer he was on that “lifetime” medication, the greater the risk of developing the disorder.  It is deeply wrong that pharmaceuticals often treat one solitary condition while simultaneously causing a series of others.  We shouldn’t have to exchange illnesses in an ever-debilitating tunnel of poorer and poorer health.

A few years after that episode, after good food, stress reduction and consistent efforts for good sleep became top priorities in our household, we found a private psychiatrist who specialized in bipolar disorder.  Under his guidance, my husband began half-dosing his medication until he no longer needed it at all.  Sure, he still suffered periodic mood swings, but nothing like the episode of bipolar disorder we withstood together.

Chronic Pain

As a result, largely, of the medication, my husband also suffered from chronic pain – liver based.  This chronic and near incapacitating pain plagued him.  Even on our miniscule budget, we took time from our jobs and drove hours across mountain roads to seek  treatment from a specialist in our state only to hear that my husband would have to live with pain for the rest of his life.  My husband was in his mid-twenties at this time.

Dissatisfied with the doctor’s dooming perspective, he sought treatment from a local naturopathic physician as well as an acupuncturist.  Through whole foods and a liver cleanse, as recommended by the naturopath, and through regular treatments performed by the acupuncturist, my husband’s chronic pain dissipated and eventually disappeared.  No, he didn’t have to and now doesn’t live with pain.

Finding the Weston A Price Foundation and Traditional Foods

While good nutrition and whole foods proved critical during my husband’s recovery from both bipolar disorder and chronic pain, we had not yet enjoyed the good fortune of finding the Weston A Price Foundation.  Instead, we did what we thought was best and what, undoubtedly, many people still do think is best: we adhered to a whole foods vegetarian diet.  We focused on Diet for a New America and the terribly disappointing China Study, but something was lacking. Very occasionally, desperate for protein or good fats, we indulged our cravings with salmon or fish, having never heard of grass-fed beef or pasture-raised pork let alone fresh raw milk.

After coming across Nourishing Traditions in a book swap and starting a farmers market we fell in love with good, wholesome traditional foods. But for a few months we were at odds – he preferred a vegetarian diet while I felt adamant that traditional foods, including good quality animal foods, would prove critical to our mental and physical health.  Indeed, I noticed that my husband did better – slept better, balanced emotions and anxiety significantly better when he ate high quality animal foods and seafoods in particular.  Eventually, he and I both adopted traditional foods to the betterment of our health.

A Continual Journey

We know only too well how fragile good health can be and, for us, we are ever-vigilant and going to great measures to ensure that stress reduction, including avoiding stressful situations and people, good sleep and good food are the cornerstones of our lifestyle.  Even now, when I see my husband putting in late nights, I urge him to sleep knowing from our experience how severely lack of sleep disrupts his health.  We take careful effort to eat well, planning meals with a focus on high-quality animal foods, sustainably grown vegetables, broths, fermented foods and the occasional grain, properly prepared of course.

Should we deviate from our lifestyle, during times of travel or increased work load, we notice changes – in moods, in our son’s ability to cope and our overall health and appearance.  It is then that we remind ourselves that health is not something to take lightly, and we, as a family, make a concerted effort to reduce stress, get adequate and restful sleep and eat particularly nutrient-dense foods.

After all, quality health is our birthright that must be earned through educational trial and error and it’s a right we must exercise and protect for its rewards are a higher quality of life through enlightenment and nutritional biochemical balance.