The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
Living with bipolar disorder sucks! Each week Michelle Reittinger and her guests explore tools and resources that help you learn how to live well with your bipolar. If you are tired of suffering and want to live a healthy, balanced, productive life with your bipolar, this podcast was designed with you in mind.
The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
EP 68: Beyond the Medication Merry-Go-Round with Dr. Teralyn Sell
We challenge the “gold standard” of therapy plus meds and show how nutrition, sleep, and curiosity reveal root causes that the psychiatric labels miss. Dr. Teralyn Sell shares her journey from traditional psychotherapy to functional brain health, and why feeding the brain changes everything.
• how siloed systems block simple solutions like omega‑3s
• the cost of medication‑first care on memory, mood and agency
• subjectivity in diagnosis and the loss of curiosity
• thyroid, UTIs, inflammation and blood sugar as symptom drivers
• amino acids and micronutrients to support neurotransmitters
• protein timing and cofactors for dopamine and serotonin
• small steps that work: blue‑light limits, steady protein, better sleep
• rebuilding identity and autonomy when tapering with support
• the pillars: eat, sleep, move, meditate for lasting change
Links:
website: WWW.drteralyn.com
TikTok: @dr_teralyn
Instagram: @Dr_Teralyn
Facebook: @dr_teralyn
Bio:
Today’s guest is Dr. Teralyn Sell, a PhD brain health expert, nutritionist & psych med deprescribing professional who is grounded in psychology and functional wellness. She has spent over two decades helping people untangle the root causes of mental health struggles. She’s known for her no-nonsense, science-meets-real-life approach to anxiety, depression, and stress, guiding people beyond symptom management into lasting change.
Dr. Teralyn is the cohost for the nationally acclaimed podcast, the Gaslit Truth and has been featured in national media, including television and radio, for her refreshing take on mental health, which combines neuroscience, psychology, and nutrition. When she’s not working with clients or speaking to audiences, you’ll find her enjoying time with her husband of 30 years, her three adult children, and her granddaughter, often somewhere on the Florida Gulf.
Her mission? To empower you to reclaim your brain, your body, and your life, without getting stuck on the medication merry-go-round.
Thanks for joining me on the Upside of Bipolar. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. If you're ready to dive deeper, grab my book, The Upside of Bipolar: 7 Steps to Heal Your Disorder. If you're ready to heal your symptoms, join my monthly membership, The Upsiders' Tribe, to transform chaos into hope.
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There has to be way more to mental health than just talking your way out of a problem. And why is it that the the even the gold standard, right? The gold standard is combining therapy with psychmeds. That's the gold standard, folks, right? That's what you hear. However, the majority of clients that a therapist will see will be on medication already, majority. But was I ever offered therapy, even though I was offered psychiatric medication? No, never. So it's like the reciprocity of that gold standard doesn't go back the other way.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar, where we uncover the true sources of bipolar symptoms and share proven tools for recovery. I'm your host, Michelle Reitinger, number one international best-selling author of the Upside of Bipolar Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. In this podcast, I bring you solo insights from my journey and guest interviews with leading researchers and experts. Join us to transform chaos into hope and reclaim your life. Let's heal together. Hey, welcome to the Upside of Bipolar. I am your host, Michelle Reitinger, and I have a phenomenal guest today. Today's guest is Dr. Tarolyn Cell, a PhD brain health expert, nutritionist, and psychmed prescribing professional who is grounded in psychology and functional wellness. She has spent over two decades helping people untangle the root causes of mental health struggles. She's known for her no-nonsense science meets real life approach to anxiety, depression, and stress, guiding people beyond symptom management into lasting change. Dr. Terolin is the co-host for the nationally acclaimed podcast, The Gaslit Truth, a phenomenal podcast, by the way, and has been featured in national media, including television and radio, for her refreshing take on mental health, which combines neuroscience, psychology, and nutrition. When she's not working with clients or speaking to audiences, you'll find her enjoying time with her husband of 30 years, her three adult children, and her granddaughter, often somewhere on the Florida Gulf. Her mission to empower you to reclaim your brain, your body, and your life without getting stuck on medic on the medication merry-go-round. Dr. Terolin, I am so thrilled to have you here today.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for being my guest. Yeah, no problem. I'm happy to be here. If my mission in life now is just to give a good message of hope and change and all the things. Um, so I'm happy to be able to do that for your audience today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So let's start with, I want to start with your story.
Speaker 1:Okay. So when we were talking, I'm like, which story do you want? Do you want my professional story, my personal story? Uh the combination of the two is probably the most, I don't know, powerful story, but I used to be a very traditional psychotherapist. Like I my whole training and education was rooted in tradition, like what you see today, in diagnosing, in you know, manualized programs, CBT, DBT. Uh, and then I switched into EMDR stuff and all of that. And um, I had been working in the prison system in my state, and that's where I received this traditional training that I had, also traditional in psychiatry. So we were the right-hand people of the psychiatrist. We were the eyes and ears of psychiatry, which was great because I learned all about psychmeds to a degree, right? So we only learned about how good they were, right? Like promoting them, and there's lots of manipulative language that we also learned that is still people still use it today. At the time, I didn't know it was manipulative language, manipulative. I just thought it was the language we used, right? Um, there one key change for me happened. There was a particular inmate who was always in segregation for fighting, like violent, all these things. So I'm researching and I'm like, what? When I say researching, I mean like perusing the internet at that point, right? Like I'm I'm looking for articles, I'm looking for something to help with aggression. And I happened to come across a study. And this study was kind of the thing that changed things for me, got my got my juices flowing, if you will. Um, it was a study done in a jail on aggressive inmates in jail, and that would be the closest to prison, right? There's not a lot of research done in jails and prison because they are one of the most vulnerable populations, right? So anyway, I saw this and it was on omega-3 fatty acids and how when they gave some of the most violent or aggressive inmates in this jail omega-3 fatty acids, that their aggression reduced. And I was like, I have hit the holy grail. I have, I am going to bring this research to the treatment team, and this is gonna be a slam dunk of slam dunks. So I brought it and I'm handing it out, and the psychiatrist says, You're not a dietitian. So I gathered it all back up and left, and that was pretty much it. I was instantly shut down by psychiatry because I wasn't a dietitian and I was talking about omega-3 fatty acids. And I'm like, nobody wanted to listen because the systems that I was working in at the time were so siloed that it don't speak out of turn, don't speak about something that, quote, you don't know, blah, blah, blah. Even though this was a research article, it was good research. And I was like, it's worth a shot, isn't it? Like at this point, like the guys that we had were to get more protein would eat a lot of peanut butter. Like they were ordering peanut butter off a canteen because they were such low protein diets in there. And I'm I'm thinking, well, if we can do something, you you can prescribe omega-3 fatty acids. People do it all the time now. But they were they refused. So that was kind of the beginning of like a little the little morsel that kind of stuck in my brain. And um eventually, um, and I'll get into my psyched story in a minute, but after a while, I decided I I rose to clinical director and things like that in a different prison system and decided that I just couldn't make the changes there that needed to be made. And I know that seems like a I copped out, I left, I took a hike, like I went out of there because it was systems that I just couldn't, I could no longer in good conscious support if I couldn't make a change, right? That that could be good for these people. Anyway, so then I went into full-time private practice and I thought, well, this is gonna be easy, right? Like this is gonna be the easiest thing. Very quickly, I saw many women particularly uh come in who were on multiple psychiatric medications, multiple, multiple classifications, and they were getting worse and worse and worse and deteriorating, as we call it. Um, and again, so I took to the internet again, and this is like early stage internet, like this isn't how it is today. Like you have access to so many things. And um, I happened to come across, and they're still here today, the Alliance for Addictions and Mental Health Solutions. And the Alliance was doing a lot of profound work with Julia Ross. I don't know if you have heard of Julia Ross. Julia Ross was the author of the book called The Mood Cure. And um, she was with the Alliance at this time, and they were teaching people about amino acids. So, what I was feverishly searching was things like, I remember my search was like how to improve dopamine naturally, how to improve serotonin naturally, how to because at that time, you know, we're still thinking it's a deficiency in these things and you know, whatever. Um, so I was like, well, how do we improve these, you know, the mental state of people naturally? And that's I I happened to come across amino acid therapy, and I was like, oh, this is it. This is it. And from there, I got deeply involved in nutrition, went back to nutrition school. I I'm also like a lifelong student. If someone would just pay me for that job, I know, I would just, you know, it would be much easier. But unfortunately, I pay them a lot uh to continue to get the education that I need. Because when you think about it, just you know, so I have a PhD in psychology with an addiction studies focused, and I have a master's degree in counseling psychology. We didn't talk about even how to make a neurotransmitter. Like that wasn't part of, even though I'm studying addictions, right? I'm studying, but what they they talked about dopamine, they talk about serotonin, but they don't say, like, from a lifestyle perspective, how to help somebody improve the health of their brain and neurotransmitters. And that is that's still today. There's no talk about nutrition in schools like that. Like it's just void, it's just not there. So I knew inherently that in order for me to bridge that gap, I was gonna have to go seek out that education elsewhere. Um, and so that's what I did, and that's what I continue to do today. Um, but I think it should be included in all curriculum of any mental health professional, social workers, therapists, all of that. Because right in our licensure, it says lifestyle. Like, so I can ask you if you drink caffeine or smoke a cigarette, but I can't talk about like, are you eating any protein? You know, like yeah, building blocks to neurotransmitters, protein, easy. That's not a hard conversation, but yet it's omitted in education. So anyway, so that's kind of how I got here. That's the like abbreviated version of how I got here. Um, my personal story is a little different and it continues to unfold because the more I interact with people now, especially people who are on psychiatric medications or trying to get off of them, the more I piece together my own story with health and my own um experiences with psychiatric medications. And, you know, I'm in my upper 50s now, so everybody's trying to throw psych meds at me. Everybody, anytime I go to the doctor, they're like, here's a psych med. I'm like, get bent. Like, no, I'm not gonna take a psych med for this, right?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I I feel like unless you are like as cynical as I am sometimes, um, people don't confront that. They just take it, right? They'll just be like, okay, doctor said take it. You know, especially menopause women are the biggest growing group of you know, psychiatric medication consumers. So I'm right there. Um, so now cautiously, of course, when a doctor asks me about things like fatigue, I'm like, I'm fine. Don't even bother. Don't bother. I'm I'm good, you know. Um, but my it do, well, first of all, I'm just rambling on right now. Do you have any questions about that so far?
Speaker 2:No, I I do want you to get into your personal story because I think that those things affect each other. It's really fascinating. That's actually one of the things that that piqued my interest in you when I first found you on social media was all the stuff you're talking about with your personal story. And I'm thinking, oh man, like a psychiatric professional, you know, a psychologist and by by education that went through all of these things, and I think that those also seem to have had a profound impact on the way that you viewed mental illness and the way that you view you know your clients. And so can you talk a little bit about that as well?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So my first introduction to psychiatric medications personally was when I was about five months pregnant. Um, I went to my OBGYN and uh she had asked, Do you remember feeling like you might have had postpartum depression with my first pregnancy with my first child? And I said, All I said was, yeah, I'm pretty sure I think so, or something benign like that. It wasn't anything super profound. And by the end of that, so this I was 32, I think. This is way before I even got my master's degree. I didn't start my master's until that child was one. Okay, so this was way before I even knew anything of self-advocacy or anything. Um, anyway, so she gave me an antidepressant. Am I allowed to say what it was here? Sure, yeah, absolutely. It was uh Zolof slash Certraline. So it was just, it was a very typical SSRI. It wasn't a massive, you know. Anyways, it but it still is massive because I look at everything now as a drug before treatment. Okay. So even when we say it was just, you know, a little SSRI, that little SSRI can cause a lot of problems later on. Um, anyway, so I was on this and um I gave birth, which was like a very dissociated experience. Like I was so not connected to it. And these are things that I didn't realize at the time. These are things that I'm like, I remember feeling these ways, and I remember my son being born, and I just remember giving him nonchalantly. They put him on my chest, and I immediately gave him to my husband and said, Go do what you got to do. I need to sleep. Like I was just disconnected from the entire experience. And that is something that I do remember. Okay. He also had a lot of trouble feeding. Um, he was almost uh, they almost it was very close to putting him in the uh NICU because he would not feed. And now I know why. Okay, so sluggish feeding, inability to latch, all those things is a big deal. And so I also know now he was likely going through his withdrawal. Um, but again, nobody was putting those things together for me at that time because it everything it was just safe, right? Like it was just safe.
Speaker 2:It was nobody probably even knew.
Speaker 1:Like, I don't think anybody's got curiosity had any curiosity about that at the time. Not really. It was it was quick after that, within a couple years, that some lawsuits were starting to come out about Zolofton pregnancy. Um, so that was interesting to me when I started seeing those happen. Um, but anyway, so all this is retrospective, right? So some of the stuff, like I was so disconnected from my life. So I was on, I was on an SSRI for the prevention of postpartum depression for six years.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because then after, when you start telling your doctor, prescriber, like I kept saying, like, I don't feel good. Like I just, I have no pleasure. I have no, well, that's depression, you're depressed. You you need more. So, you know, so she would give me more. Eventually I started refusing more because I was talking a lot about I need off, I want off. And so the resistance to get off was the profound part. No help, no nothing. It was always, well, maybe you know, this is your depression. And I'm like, I think I knew I knew that it wasn't like that wasn't me. That wasn't me. I keep in mind I had kids at home and I was married and all these things. And um I wasn't me. And again, retrospectively, uh, during that six-year period, like I almost chucked my marriage because I couldn't connect to him, and I was a real, real bitch to be around. Like, you know, the irritability, the negativity, all of it was just it was present. And um, I kept thinking it's everybody else, it's everybody else, it's not me, it's my life, it's all these things. It was the medication 100%. Because when it took me about people ask, like, how long did it take you to get off of that? Blah, blah, blah. What was that like? I did it all the wrong ways because again, I didn't have the help that I have now. I was still stuck in a very traditional system, right? But I knew I needed off of it. So what had happened was we moved. So we moved two hours or something from my prescriber. So we moved away. And I thought to myself, well, I'm not gonna drive back there every, you know, six months to get a new script. Um, so I either find a new doctor to keep prescribing me or I just to do it. I just get off of it. And so I just got off of it. I cold turkeyed off of it. Luckily, where I was working was a subset of the prison system at this time. It was a it was a kind of a prison within a prison, and it focused a lot on wellness. So there was lots of lifestyle stuff and wellness and working out. And my office mate, I'll credit her for this. She was a big runner and she got me into running. This is all like simultaneous stuff, like, you know, divine intervention, if you will, at the exact same time of me coming off of this. She's she is jogging and telling me, just come to the gym with her because we had an on-site gym. So I started going to the gym and I started jogging, I started eating better. I lost about a hundred pounds. Like it was it within the course of a couple of years.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that was how I was successfully able to get off of the psychiatric medication and reconnect my brain to my body. Um, and I think all the working out that I did really helped me like consolidate all that back together without knowing that that's what it was. So yeah, so that was do I say do that? No, don't do that. That was probably a really bad idea. That was a real bad idea. But again, when you're in the space of like desperation, and at the time, again, these books, the Mousey deprescribing guidelines, all there wasn't Facebook groups for support. There was nothing. It was just your prescriber and you. And that was pretty much it. And so you really had to kind of lean in to yourself during these, during these times. But I also think that probably because there was a lot of trauma working in the spaces that I was working in, um, trauma that I saw, traumatic things that I witnessed, traumatic things that I was involved with. I think that I probably wouldn't have come out of it the way that I did if I wouldn't have been medicated, by the way, and disconnected from myself. Does that make sense? Yeah. Like, yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, because I was so numb to anything. Uh-huh. Didn't bother me. None of that stuff bothered me at all during that time. It bothers me now because it my humanity and my pleasure was stolen from me for, you know, between six and eight years when all was said and done, which is a huge part. The biggest bothersome piece for me was, you know, in order to have a memory, like a good memory, like I had a young family, you have to have really strong emotions to retain the memory systems. And I was so flat that I barely remember anything. And that that's my biggest regret of the entire thing is the loss of time and memory with my kids, and I don't know, the the birth and all of it. Like there's there's a lot, there's still some regret in those moments, but um mostly felt lied to. You know, like this is something that you need. And then suddenly I it was so like I go back to the story, it was prescribed as a preventative, preventive, preventative, I can't speak. And then suddenly it turned into something that I needed for the rest of my life. Yes. I didn't even have depression at the time of the prescription, but suddenly it turned into a lifelong mental health condition or disorder that I didn't even start with. Was I depressed at during the 100% medication-induced depression? But that's not how it was looked at at all. Yeah. So yeah, but like I said, every time now I go to the doctor, like I've been presented psychiatric medications so many times, and I think people can resonate with this. When when I was about to leave the prison system that I was at, when I was about to leave, I was struggling in this conflict place, like um what I needed and what the changes that I wanted to do systemically weren't possible. Um, so I had severe anxiety. I had tons of anxiety, which by the way, now could have been protracted withdrawal. Um, because it was still during that time frame. Again, I didn't know this stuff. I I didn't have language to these experiences. It was just I suddenly had this weird anxiety that I had never felt before in my life. I've never been an anxious person. Um, but I was having panic attacks constantly in the car, like all these things. And so I went to the doctor and I was prescribed and I took home the prescription for effects are so an SNRI. Um, I took it two times, so two nights, and I couldn't get up out of bed. I was so dizzy. Um, I couldn't function. And of course, what do they tell you? Well, you gotta get used to it. Yeah, or that you have to get used to your body needs time to get used. And I'm like, build up in your system. Or yes, I can't get up. Like, I can't. I had such bad like vertigo and nausea. And so after two nights of taking that, I was like, like this little voice in my head was like, You don't need this. Like, this is not something you want to get used to. And by the way, I had just come off, not just, but a few years, come off of an SSRI for all that time. So I was really struggling with this idea that great, now I'm gonna be stuck on this for another who knows how long. I really feel like I dodged a bullet on the SNRI because those are even worse to get off of. Um, so I remember driving home and I thought, you know what, I can medicate myself through this or I can quit. And I came home and I said to my husband, I said, I'm gonna quit. I'm gonna quit. And he goes, Thank God. And I was like, why didn't you say that earlier that I had a choice to quit? You know, you know what I mean? Like that it's a choice, you know. People, I want you to know it is a choice to do something different. You always have that choice. We put our own barriers in front of ourselves. And I tell people this too, and this is how I live my life. Everything is figure out, and it does get figured out. That's what happens. So I was able to quit, go into private practice. Things get weirder because several years passed and I have thyroid problems. I believe from my SSRI experience, um, metabolic things, thyroid thyroid, because it was one or two years into medications that suddenly my thyroid got jacked. I was pre-diabetic. They're medicating me for that. Like, I'm like, I was 33, 34 at the time. They're treating me like I was 70, you know, with all of these things. And um everything cleared up except for the thyroid. That's been something that I have had to struggle with for the entinitis. I have that too. Um, but anyway, those things I can live with. So I know when my thyroid is in hypo, I have hypothyroid. I know when it's in hypothyroid because I get very fatigued, like I can feel it. So I went to an endocrinologist because I was like, you know, probably time to look at this a little bit differently. This is probably 10 years ago now. And I sit down, she's like, Why are you here? And I said, Well, because I'm really fatigued and you know, my thyroid, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, Well, we can run some labs. So keep in mind this conversation is before any labs were run. Okay, we can run some labs. And I was like, I've never really done that, never really dug in. And she goes, In the meanwhile, though, here is I can prescribe you an antidepressant, a stimulant, and a sleep aid. Gosh. In 20 minutes. Yeah, I get such backlash on social media for sharing that. No way, you were given a stimulant like that. I'm like, yeah, yes, way, yes way, 100%. Because I said I'm fatigued. All right. So the automatic assumption is you're depressed and you need better sleep. And you know, to also so you can function better. Here's a stimulant so you're not so fatigued in in the midday, right? Yeah. And I said, no, thank you. Don't bother. Don't bother. I'm like, no, I need no, no, thank you, don't bother. And she goes, then why did you come in? And I said, Because of my thyroid, maybe you're an endocrinologist, whatever. And uh, she did order the labs, thankfully, and turned out I was in another stage of hypothyroidism. So, and I had very low vitamin D and B6 and B12. And I'm like, that would not have been resolved. It probably would have been worse if I would have taken that stack of psych meds, right? Yeah. So I'm like, what the what the heck? So for about 10 years I was skating by without being offered psychiatric medications until probably five months ago for weight loss. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:For weight loss? Okay, wait a minute. Like some counterintuitive.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Yeah, I I put on probably 50 pounds from Zoloft by itself. Yes, yes, yes, which nobody wants to believe that either. And I'm like, believe it, it happened. But yeah, so they're like, well, you know, there's some research out there that shows that I think it was uh well butrin. Well butrin can help with weight loss. I'm like, yeah, it can also make you crazy. Yes, and uh can also make you gain weight, which is something that will probably happen to me. Yeah, yes, um, but yeah, I was like, uh no, no, no, no, thank you. You know, so you you learn to temper conversations, right? When you know the antidote, so to speak, is gonna be an offered psychiatric medication. And so when people talk like, well, you know, it's a mental health diagnostic, they're not going through any diagnostic criteria to give you most of these medications. None.
Speaker 2:It makes me so crazy. That that makes me so crazy. And and one of the things that I love about like, first of all, you have a fantastic book. I want to make sure the audience knows it's called Your Best Brain. Here it is, I'll show it. It's yeah, it's fabulous. I have my coffee right here. She's got it tabbed. I love it. I've got yes, I've got all these notes here. So um, so I one of the things that you mentioned this word earlier, and I want to talk about this because I think this is one of the biggest issues that we have when people are struggling with any kind of symptoms, you know, they they get they get lumped into these categories and and then we are then we diagnose them with a disease, right?
Speaker 1:So you have you know, you can never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever heal from, by the way.
Speaker 2:Yes. Well, and it's and it's a genetic disease. You know, we we have this, we get this idea that we don't have any control over these things, that it's beyond our control. And and so you get diagnosed with, you know, my diagnosis initially was uh depression and anxiety because I was so depressed I couldn't even almost articulate what was going on with me. I had an aunt with me that was giving a lot of information to the doctor. And when they put me on the antidepressant, my first antidepressant was Zoloft. And within a few months, I had ramped up into mania. And oh, whoops, we misdiagnosed you. You have bipolar disorder. And it's that's the biggest load of BS I've ever heard. I know, and I was so angry. I was so angry when I read when I read Anatomy of an Epidemic and I learned about like the prevalence of people getting diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and then people say, Well, you were misdiagnosed. And I'm like, oh my gosh. Like, there is no scientific basis diagnoses. They're right.
Speaker 1:You were misdiagnosed. You shouldn't have had a diagnosis.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Accurate diagnosis. I always ask the misdiagnose. If somebody accuses you of saying you were misdiagnosed, I always say, Okay, then what constitutes an accurate diagnosis? Because I was diagnosed by eight separate psychiatrists over a 12-year period between my my own psychiatrists and hospitalizations and moves. Every single one of them affirmed the diagnosis of bipolar starting with bipolar two, and then later bipolar one when I had a psychotic episode in a hospitalization, right? And so what you're talking about with these, and you talked about the same thing within the prison system. We don't look at these, we don't look at any of these symptoms as individual indicators of an underlying distress that might be biologic, you know, biological meaning like your body's not getting the nutrition it needs, the brain's not getting the nutrition it needs, the your gut might be messed up, you know, maybe, maybe you have unprocessed trauma, maybe you've got, you know, your your body has been in fight or flight for so long. You know, there's all of these different pieces that could be addressed if we would stop dumping all of the symptoms into into these into these categories that are then identified as a disease that must be medicated.
unknown:Right.
Speaker 2:So I I want to ask you you did go through a traditional psychiatric training, well, psychological. But I mean within it's all within the same framework, right?
Speaker 1:People get mad at me for this too. You're not a psychiatrist. Do you guys really think that I didn't have to study psychopharmacology?
Speaker 2:Yes, what? Well, and also. All of the education now, all of the education now is framed within this disease mindset, everything. So it's not just psychiatrists. The psychiatrist, obviously, all of it is framed within the disease mindset and this idea that psychopharmacology, you know, the pharma pharmacological solution is the first line of defense, and that's what needs to happen. And all of the other disciplines that are support kind of like desire, you know, it's it's kind of like a support system for the psychiatry. For psychiatry, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I want to know how you where where the change came for like did you start, were you questioning within your training? Because it sounds like you got through your training, you got into your profession, and you were still I did not question a single thing. Okay, so where did where did you start questioning it? Like, I want to know where that happened because it's so rare, really. It is so rare to find somebody who comes up through that system who is even open. And I know you talked a little bit about it, but can you talk a little kind of talk a little bit more about when you started questioning, like, wait a minute, maybe maybe this is wrong?
Speaker 1:So I questioned it in the prison to an extent, right? In part because uh again, part of one part of my job before I hit the supervisor position was doing psyche valves. That's all I did all day long was psychiatric evaluations. And I would spend hours upon hours sifting through information, giving standardized testing, all these things to come up with the proper diagnosis. The only ones that would get to me for a psyche valve were the ones that were question mark diagnosis, meaning they've been diagnosed with just about anything and everything in the DSM, and they don't know what their true diagnosis is. Okay. So then they would come to me, and I think I don't know if Jen had that position the same. We worked together actually. Um, so I that they would come to me or other uh practitioners who had the same position as I did and do the psyche valves, right? And so during that time, it it was questionable because I kept thinking like this is all just my thoughts, really. After you put together like the the outcomes of the um the testing and then their history, then it's just all me. Then it's just it's still my view because it doesn't really spit out, right? Oh, this is the criteria. It like if you if they go through like a computerized program, which most of ours were um hand scored, we'd scored them by hand. There were a couple that weren't hand scored at that time. I'm sure there's more that are not hand scored now. Um, but they'll list out certain ideas for you, right? And then then based on the person you go in, there's still still such a subjective, you know, piece to this. So that was when I was starting to question like, this just doesn't even feel real. Like this doesn't even feel real. But I wasn't questioning it enough to be like, I gotta get the heck out of here. Like I I I wasn't doing that because keep in mind I was working for the state, like that is a secure job. That is a that is a sure thing, retirement, health care band, the whole nine yards to leave that. Yeah, people thought I was crazy when I walked away from it. They're like, You're walking away from the sure thing. And I'm like, Yeah, I have to. I have to walk away to save myself. Now I know that my like unrest too was me working in a system that I couldn't support, right? So that was probably the turning point situation for me because my body was literally uh physiologically and just emotionally rebelling against going to work every day because it was something that I just I started to not believe in, right? And let me get this clear it's not that I don't believe in mental illness or mental health care, it's that I didn't believe in the systems that we had to always work within in order to change that for somebody, which in those systems was mostly medicated restraint. Okay, so that was so much medicated restraint in there. Um, so that was something that I was like, this was weird. There, there was another, like, there's a couple things that really stand out to me. One time was an elderly, um, he was an elderly inmate. I think he was around 70-ish at the time, and overnight he became psychotic overnight. And everyone was like, he's faking it, he's faking it, he's faking it. Psychiatry swoops in, gives him antipsychotics, like immediately. And here's little me. I go up to the guy, he was one of my clients at the time, and I went up to him and he was psychotic for sure. I knew this guy, and I turned around, I said, Did anyone check for a UTI? Sure as shit. Oh my gosh, he had a UTI. And I was like, little old me from the psychological unit has to tell physicians, Did you check him for a UTI? Right? Like, he's elderly, like I know this stuff. Like, you doesn't take a rocket science to know that. And so that that was always very curious to me, because I was like, it doesn't make sense to just throw somebody doesn't go psychotic overnight. Come on, like this doesn't make any sense. So it was either he became psychotic overnight somehow and some miracle at 70, or there was an underlying condition, which in no way, or he was faking it. Like that, those were the only options to this thing. So my introduction to psychiatry and psychology was pretty cynical as well. Like, so I'm I can be kind of ashamed at some of the things I supported during during those times. And I think that was where my body was like, don't do this, you know, like this is not okay. This is not okay. Um, but really I I do when I told you the story of the one woman sitting on my couch who would come in every week and on more and more meds and worse and worse and worse to the point of being suicidal. And I was like, There's there's gotta be another way. Or when somebody came in, I remember another one, and they're put on suddenly put on cholesterol medications and suddenly they were super depressed. Yeah. And I was like, hey, I think it's the cholesterol med. Yeah. Oh, my doctor said no, no, no, no. And I'm like, I don't know. So then they went off, and guess what? Depression remitted, like, you know, and I'm like, okay, so like I'm on to something. And so that's really like I wish there were like one epiphany moment where I was like, enough, you know, but I think it was a series of things that shifted. And I also felt like as a therapist, that I just couldn't do enough. And I remember stumbling across some things about, you know, um, it's not a deficiency in Ritalin or it's not a Zolof deficiency or whatever. And then I kept thinking, like, there has to be way more to mental health than just talking your way out of a problem.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know? And why is it that that the the even the gold standard, right? The gold standard is combining therapy with psych meds. That's the gold standard, folks, right? That's what you hear. However, the majority of clients that a therapist will see will be on medication already, majority. But was I ever offered therapy, even though I was offered psychiatric medication? No, never. So it's like the reciprocity of that gold standard doesn't go back the other way. So now, of course, in my cynicism, I'm like, right, because you were creating psychiatric soldiers in us, right? Go get on psych meds, go get on psychmeds, which basically erodes confidence in a therapist, right? Because it's like, oh, you get to a certain place and you have to refer to psychiatry because you can't cut it after this place. And I'm like, but I think you can. I I think you can, you know, so I totally understand what you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Like there wasn't one moment because even with my own progression through like my awakening, my like my it's you know, I talk, I talk about anatomy of an epidemic being my red pill moment, but truly I like I had had suspicions for years and things didn't make sense to me, but I didn't have enough confidence in my own intuition to like do anything about that, right?
Speaker 1:Nor support, nor support. Like, imagine somebody like me in the prisons. I I brought in research about omega-3 fatty acids and was pretty much laughed out of a treatment plan room, right? Yeah, and so imagine one person, little old me, trying to like change a system or a way of thinking. Never, never, never would be.
Speaker 2:You know, in one moment. And even over time, like I when I started, when I started my blog to try and share what I was learning, I was still super hesitant. Like I would, I was never gonna say like psych meds are causing problems because I thought, well, maybe some people do need psychiatric meds, and maybe it's just me that was, you know, that benefited from getting off of them. And so I was so afraid to to start being more confident in what I was learning because I was still afraid that maybe there was this population that still needed these things, and so I didn't want to like And by the way, I gotta say, well, there might be, but there's also a population that is very harmed, right? And the thing is it's like taking, it's like playing Russian roulette with your brain when you take these psychiatric medications because it's absolutely yes. Well, and the other thing is is that there is when we have these diagnoses, there is it completely eliminates any curiosity into what actually might be causing the symptoms. Right. So people stop being curious because they think they've been given an answer. When when somebody is diagnosed with depression, when they've been diagnosed with anxiety, when they've been diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia, they they stop being curious and they stop looking for answers because they think they've been given an answer. All they've been told is that they have this cluster of symptoms, but they think the diagnosis means you have a broken brain. Yes, you have a disease.
Speaker 1:They think it means if you have if you have a diagnosable mental health condition in the DSM, the funneled meaning is I have a broken brain. Yes. And that's what it is. Like it, and what once you believe that you have a broken brain because somebody diagnosed you with a broken brain, that's now the paradigm that you're going to live in and move in for the rest of your life until something might happen to say, maybe I don't, you know, maybe this doesn't. Or or when you start off with depression, you end up with anxiety, bipolar disorder, all these other things, right? It's like that has to make somebody curious, right? Because it's like that wasn't my originating thing, right?
Speaker 2:Well, and it's interesting because I I whenever I would ask these questions, so you know, starting off with depression and anxiety, and and I and once I had the paradigm of bipolar, then my brain went back and looked for evidence earlier. And so I could see evidence. So I'm like, oh yeah, but if you go back into my life, you can see when I would go through these periods of depression and then I would get really elevated in my mood. And so I would our brain goes back and tries to make sense of our lives based on this this new paradigm that we've been given, right? But it is so it is so harmful because it there are two things. Naturally, as human beings, I think that there is we don't really love to take responsibility for ourselves. Like it's we don't. I mean, it's just I you know, if if I can if I can get out of being responsible for something and blame it on something else, I will. Like that's just a lot of things. I did that for years. Yes. And so if I can so I think it appeals a little bit to part of us, part of our being, because because then we're not there, I'm not responsible for the choices that I made when I was manic or when I was depressed, or I'm not, you know, it's or even the idea that my brain is broken. Yes, like there's I it's not my fault. Like it's not my fault, and I that's just the way I am, right? Um, but there's also, I think, also part of us, part of our soul take uh receives its feelings of value and self-worth from personal accountability. So when you take that personal accountability away from people and they are doing destructive things to people around them and they're they're saying, well, it's not my fault, part of them is feeling like, well, yeah, but look what I'm doing. You know, there's there's part of us and we start to feel terrible about ourselves because we can't hold it, we can't have a healthy relationship, or we're hurting our families, or you know, and so one of the things I love that you do in your book is you go through cat, you know, category by category and help people start to identify what could actually be the sources of your symptoms. And it's so powerful because the way you talk about it too is not just you're not just telling them, like, for example, you're not just telling them you need to eat healthy, you're telling them why and what it does to your brain. I love how you go through and you talk about, and this is actually something I want to talk about. You talk about the neurotransmitters and you talk about imbalances, and we know that I I want to talk about this because I there are we can get our our neurotransmitters can get out of balance because we're not giving them the building blocks they need to function in a healthy way, but that is not the same thing as the chemical imbalance theory of depression, right? So I want to ask you, can you talk about that? Because in your book you talk about the different neurotransmitters, the different kinds of imbalances you can end up with, and what can lead to those imbalances. And you also, the other thing I love that's brilliant, I've never seen this before, is that you go through and you identify symptoms that can be indicators of these imbalances. So that's straight from Julia.
Speaker 1:That's that's straight from Julia Ross, by the way. That's how I was trained to do it. Yes. And that's what that's what I do in practice now, too, is when it when we track symptomology, is use those checklists, right? Like use them. So you're welcome to use them, right? They're not mine. Like the this is not Terylyn Cell's, you know, mastermind here. That stuff was was in trainings that I took, and that's why it stoked me because it can be very powerful.
Speaker 2:Well, and the other thing, sorry, one other thing that I want to just since this is like a good place to say this, is it is calling out specific symptoms instead of lumping them into buckets, right? So instead of instead of saying like I have anxiety, you are calling out like racing thoughts or you know, and they're all and all these different symptoms could actually be related to different neurotransmitters. So we lump them all into this bucket and and throw psychotropic drugs at them, and it can actually like make everything go haywire because you're not actually addressing the issue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I mean, from a fundamental level, the whole psychiatric medication thing doesn't even make sense. I know. You're you're you're going to throw a pill at every psychological problem. The same meds are used for depression as anxiety. Like, how how does that even make sense as far as like individual care? It it it makes no sense to me, you know, except for benzodiazepines, but I'm talking about like your traditional antidepressants are also used as anti-anxiety meds. Make that make sense, right? When when it could be your anxiety is a dopamine-related issue, too much dopamine, right? Too much or epinephrine, or uh agba-related issues, too high, too low. You know, one of the interesting things about neurotransmitters that you know, that checklist, one of the things we have to think about is sometimes lower serotonin looks like higher serotonin. Like sometimes, like there's this, there's this thing that happens, and it's like, well, maybe. So now I do a lot more functional lab work when I do it. Very minimal. Like some people go like thousands of dollars into functional lab work, like like they're gonna find some holy grail somewhere. I don't like I do basic stuff, and that is very powerful things. But if you're just a person and you're like, listen, I want to figure out what's happening with my mood, these checklists are a really good way to do that because they do, they separate out like neuro neurotransmitter basics. I find most people that have depressive type symptoms like low mood, lethargy, just blah, are more in the dopamine pathway than the serotonin pathway. Give someone a little L-tyrazine and they're gonna perk up. Yeah right. But instead, we have to give them an SSRI, change the way their brain communicates. Why don't we just feed it? Why don't we just give it the nutrients that it might need and want? Like, I feel like when your mood is a certain way, whether it's like anxious or low, like that's really your body calling for nutrients. Like it's calling for help and support, right? And so on the basic level, like everything is connected to everything else. Stress, right, impacts all your body systems from your hormone to your thyroid to neurotransmitters. So if we go back to like what is your stress load? So we have nutritional stress, so dietary stress, inflammatory stress, and emotional stress. That's stress, right? But in today's world, we're like, oh, I'm so stressed out. Like every, everything, the stress is like this giant bucket. I'm like, well, what is it? Like, what is the stress that you're talking about? Well, the person in the car next to me this morning on the way to oh, things you can't control? You know, like so, but really when we think about like how do we manage our stress? Do we you do we use food as fuel? Um, do we look at if there's an inflammatory or infection type thing going on? We need to. That's huge. Inflammation is a huge piece of mental health, um, especially bipolar and schizophrenia and things like that. They look at uh neuroinflammation a lot, depression's coming forward with that, and then your emotional stress that you're under. So whether it's trauma, right? Historic trauma, or even just bad relationship or a work environment, like again, taking a step back and being like, I have some choices and how I'm gonna manage this. And I'll share the day that I made the choice to leave my job like that, I still had two weeks left to work. I had to give a two-week notice, whatever. So I still had two weeks left to work. Those two weeks, I didn't give a shit about anything. I was like, I can come in and out of here and I am cool as a cucumber, you know, like because I knew I made the change that my body was craving for me to make, you know? Yeah. And I also think that we get nutrition a little wrong now because diet culture has kind of wrecked that for us, right? Nutrition is only looked at as a way to lose weight. Yes. Right? Especially with women, weight loss, weight loss, weight loss. And um, we have to start looking at it as a way to fuel our brain and body instead of lose weight. Yeah. Women women in particular are very upset when I start talking about eating more or more nourishing foods because they're like, I gotta lose weight, I gotta lose weight. How am I gonna lose weight if you're making me eat more protein? And I'm like, well, then you gotta make a decision, you know? You you gotta make a decision, you know. Do you want to feel like garbage, right? Or do you want to try something new, you know, that maybe will give you a little bit more energy so you can go for that walk that you wanted to go for, or lift weights without being so fatigued, or you know, just attend to your life and family because you're clear-headed, you know. So I don't know. Don't know if that answers your your question, but your neurotransmitters are based in the fuel that you give your body. Yes. That's the bottom line. That that is it. That was not taught to me in school.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, and and one of the things that's so interesting, this I so there's a the book, The Better Brain, that is Dr. Bonnie Kaplan and Dr. Julia Reckledge. Which is funny because you had you said that on it and it was sitting right next to me. It is so good. This is such a good one. And it's so crazy. All the different things that they discovered as they're doing all this research, all the different, all the different ways that poor nutrition affect us. You know, that the research that they've done, I think, in like in um people that are struggling with addiction, you know, that, you know, some alcohol addiction and drug addiction and cigarettes and that, and they try and try and try to get over these addictions, and then they're given micronutrients, and all of a sudden they're able to just stop. You know, like it's our pendulum in our society has swung so far into the medication and medical mindset that we have forgotten all of the stuff our ancestors knew intuitively, and all of the things we've forgotten that our body needs fuel. Yes. Yeah, I've had a lot of people.
Speaker 1:Food is optional. Food is optional now, and that starts in high school.
Speaker 2:That well, and it's and the thing that's the thing that's interesting is that we have it's like this this great mystery that all of a sudden there's this dramatic increase in the number of people struggling with mental health issues, but we're not looking at the way that our our diets have changed just just in my lifetime, just in our lifetime. We've had like when I was a when I was a teenager, we I grew up in California, and we used to go as a family would go to their their farmer's market, their farmer's market. It is not like a farmer's market today. This is like a true farmer's market where you could buy like a box of apples or a box, like a huge box of them for like six bucks, right? And and we were eating like whole foods all the time just naturally. Like that was just the natural way that you ate. And it was, you know, a special thing to have like cold cereal, you know, like the cereal at the in the boxes at the store or something. Now we are eating almost in our society is eating almost exclusively from the inner part of the of the um store, the grocery store, which is all processed foods. It's been completely stripped of all the nutritional value. And so I that's one of the things I love about in your book is that you talk about not just in nutrition, but you talk about what the different nutrients are in the different kinds of food and what they're doing in your brain and your body. And that is so powerful because we don't even understand any of this stuff. The food pyramid did a huge number on our on our society. It really messed up what we, you know, the way that we eat. And then we all get fat and and you know, mentally ill, and everybody's like, And we wonder why that's yeah, we wonder why we've wrapped in an enigma.
Speaker 1:You know, I mean, just for the little science lesson for everybody to to make serotonin, you need foods that are higher in tryptophan, which are typically your poultry and some nuts and uh cheeses and things like that. But then you also need vitamin D, vitamin C, vitamin B6, methylated folate, like you need all of these new, they're called nutrient cofactors, have to be in place in your diet in order for tryptophan to turn into serotonin and then for serotonin to turn into melatonin to help you sleep. And so once I can like paint the picture, like here's the picture of why nutrients are important, right? It's not just protein, it's other nutrients as well. Then people kind of go, really? I had no idea why food was so important just for that brain health level, period, right? Yeah, I had no idea. Or just balancing your blood sugar so you're not doing ups and downs and ups and downs all day, which by the way, I think is why so many high schoolers are getting diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Yes, because I think it's more of a blood sugar dysregulation than anything else. Yeah, because they are high and they are low and they're all over and they're volatile and they're aggressive, aggressive, and things like that without going down a rabbit hole. I think that's kind of a basic thing to look at. I have when you have kids that uh in school are having behavioral problems, right? In school, I have historically, I don't work with kids anymore in therapy, but I would write in the with IEP teams protein breaks every two hours to stabilize blood sugar. Yeah. You want to know what happened next? Kid wasn't in the principal's office anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Shocker when you actually fuel them and don't start their day with a sugary cereal. Yes. So that by 10 o'clock they're in a sugar slump, and then adrenaline kicks in by 11 and they're kicking desks around.
Speaker 2:Well, and I left the I love there's a story in your book that you talk about a mother who had a daughter who was like 17 or 18. I think she was about to go to college and she was having like she couldn't focus. You know, she was having issues with like her energy and sleep and all of these things. And you I'm trying to remember, I think you I think you you started with I this is another thing I loved about this story is that you talked about how you didn't make big changes all at one time. You just did a little bit, you did a little bit of change with with um giving her amino aminos, right?
Speaker 1:Probably amino acids.
Speaker 2:Amino acids, and then and then you no blue light after nine o'clock, you know. And so then after a little bit of time and there's you know started to see some improvement, then you made a little bit more, you know, a couple more adjustments. And it completely changed her. You know, you had they talked about you talking there about how like people in the family couldn't handle being around her because she was so like out of control and volatile. Yeah, and and then so she was able to like be around the family and be calm, and it completely changed the way that she behaved, and it completely and then she also was able, this is another thing that I thought was fascinating. She had a really hard time studying. You you know, you talk about there about how she couldn't focus and it was really hard for her to get get herself going with her studying, but once all these things balanced out, she was able to sit down right away and get right to work on her studies.
Speaker 1:I think that's the problem, is that we think that we have to do everything in order to make a difference. And I I do think like social media has done a terrible job with lifestyle changes to make people think they have to be perfect and do it all. And I'm a huge believer in find the low-hanging fruit that's gonna make the biggest difference for somebody and go for that. And go for that. Like, like if uh, you know, if you're on social media from midnight to 2 a.m., go for that. Like stop that first. Like, stop that for that is low-hanging fruit, people. Like, stop those things first. Or if you you know start your day with caffeine and you don't eat anything till five or six when you get home, low-hanging fruit, protein every three hours, just something small. You know, this this doesn't have to be rocket science. And I I think that's why people still struggle because they're like, oh, I know I need to make all these changes. Because I do think people understand what changes they need to make. You you cannot tell me that somebody is up till 2 a.m. on TikTok. If I talk to them, they're gonna be like, Yeah, I know, I know, I know. They they know, like you inherently know, or somebody who drinks too much alcohol, they know. They know, you know, you feel it, you feel it in your body, not a day goes by that you don't think about it, you know. But I think because it feels so overwhelming to make all of the changes, um, that we make none of the changes. And there's nobody out there saying, you know what, it's okay to make one or two changes. Nobody's saying that, nobody's giving you permission to do one or two different things. It's like, oh, I have to go to the gym six days a week, you know, that's the only way. And I'm like, or maybe let's start with walking to your mailbox. Yes, yes, let's start with that, you know. But we have these grandiose ideas of what health and wellness means, you know. And so then it that's so preventative in the way people actually need to live. Like that that will get in the way of you making any change whatsoever if you view it to be so big and overwhelming. So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think I think that one of the other things that I that I think happens is we have been so steeped in this like magic pill syndrome in our society that we just want a pill. We just want somebody to give us a pill so we can just go about our life and not not have to make any of these changes or face like processing trauma or you know, being personally accountable and responsible in our lives. And I and this is not a dig at people. I I I've been there, like I've been there myself. I've been there too.
Speaker 1:I've been there too. I I think the hardest pill to swallow is the pill of accountability, right? Like you know that you have to make some changes, so just kind of do the inventory and be like, I'm gonna pick one thing off this list that I know that I absolutely need to do, which is why even in the um the chapter about sleep, like there's a whole bunch of ideas. Pick one or two, yeah, you know, pick one or two that you know would make a big difference or even a small difference and see how you feel.
Speaker 2:Like, well, and the other thing, the other thing you talking there about is um like so GABA, for example, I that's one of the things that was that helped to kind of fix my circadian rhythm. You know, it's I think that we when our especially if somebody's if somebody's been on psychotropic medications, everything gets so screwed up that when you Well, you definitely have imbalances now, like you are definitely imbalanced. So then so now now not only were the issues that that caused you to get diagnosed with these things in the first place still still raging, those are still there. But now you've got all these other issues on top of that because now everything has been totally screwed up with the psychotropic drugs. Right. Yeah. And so I so I I think that little things that you talk about, about you know, changing, you know, fixing your gut health and changing your diet, and you know, just making you know little changes here and there and the amino acids, I think, and and micronutrients, you know, taking a really solid micronutrient supplement that starts to give your brain what it needs so that your brain can start to heal, that that was a huge game changer for me. Once I got on micronutrients and got off of the psychotropic medications, and I'm I'm gonna put this caveat in there. I Dr. Sal has already mentioned this, but I'm gonna say it again. If you want to come off psychotropic medications, you need an expert to guide you through that process. So you can do anything. 100. I am not, do not any nobody listen to this and say, okay, I'm just gonna stop taking my drugs because that is.
Speaker 1:Don't do that. Like, don't do as I say, not as I do.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes. But getting all of that out of the way, like I couldn't, I tried therapy for years while I was on drugs and it I hated it.
Speaker 1:Can't talk your way out of a physiological problem. No, like that's that's my whole thing. I also wanted to bring in this idea that I put in the book right away is that we have to look at things from a different lens. So good, better, best choices, right? And some days are gonna be good enough. Okay. So this gives us leeway. So hopefully we'll start choosing the best options more frequently. But if we can choose best once a week and the rest are good and better, and then we have a day of good enough, you know. The problem is that a lot of people go down into the well, that was just good enough, right? Yeah, every day is just a good enough day. And I'm like, listen, you can make it better by choosing, you know, one. I'll I'll give an example. I was in uh I was doing a biology because I'm a forever student. And so I went back to school to learn biology. Anywho, that was a whole thing. And uh it was like nutritional biology, and this was just like uh a year and a half ago. And we had to put in, she we had a tracker and we had to put in our food for the day without judging it. And so I put in, it was a it was a crappy day. I ate pizza, I had some other things that just weren't good. And then we had to put in one fruit or one vegetable to see how the nutritional profile of the day changed. And so I put in an apple, you know, I'm like, okay, I'll just put it in apples, see how it changes. The entire nutritional value of the day changed. And so I know when typically my thinking anyway is, oh, I've had a crap day of food. What is it gonna matter if I eat an apple now? Yeah, what is that gonna matter? It's not gonna outdo the crappy food that I already ate today. And then I did this little exercise and I was like, it actually matters a lot. It matters quite a lot. Yeah. Um, will it outdo what you've already? No, it won't outdo, but it'll add some nutrition into your day that you greatly need. So when you think about the good, better, best, good enough, if you have a day of kind of a junk food day or whatever, if you want to add in one fruit or one vegetable, that is gonna change your whole nutritional profile for the day. And that will put you into the good category. Yeah. Right? Yeah. At least a little bit instead of giving yourself permission all the time. Oh, it's just a good enough day. Yeah. You know, we can we can do something to move the needle up and down in the good, better, best category. And I feel like that gives people a little bit of grace and a little bit of wiggle room to not be perfect, right? Because perfection with nutrition is uh setting setting up for failure. Yeah. That's in my opinion, you know.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think that I one of the things that I think it uh your book really helps me to, you know, helps to highlight. And I it's the same thing for, you know, in my book and the the coaching program that I do, it really, it really is. If you're serious about healing, if you've been struggling with mental health issues, you're on psychotropic medications, especially, if you want to improve, you really need somebody to work with you. You need somebody that's gonna help you through this process because it's hard enough to do it with somebody's help. But if you're doing it, if you're trying to do it entirely by yourself, like it's gonna be so easy to give up and just think, I'm just not feeling any better. I just need to go back to the psych doctor and get some more meds, right? Yeah. And so because it's you're peeling back layers of this onion and and it takes time and you and it's helpful to have an outside set of eyes, somebody that's gonna look, you know, I look at things and help you to see things more clearly. Because a lot of times we live with these symptoms for so long, they just feel normal. And so you don't even know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't know. You don't just like living with inflammation, you don't realize how inflamed you are until you're not inflamed anymore. Yes, and then you become inflamed again. You're like, whoa, yeah, this is terrible. That's my body with gluten, right? Like gluten impacts me horribly, and I didn't know it until I took it away, and then I put it back in, and I was like, Oh my god, this is profound. Yeah, this is profound, but you don't know when you're living in the confines of your own body, right?
Speaker 2:So So when somebody when somebody comes to work with you, how do you start that process? Like, what does that look like? And what is what is working with you look like?
Speaker 1:Uh a lot of curiosity. Um, because I we found that the biggest key is really understanding somebody's history. Like, how did you get here? Because it's very interesting because often the reason why someone is prescribed something 25 years ago has nothing to do with what they look like today. Like if you were prescribed something when you were 15 because you know you're struggling through school or something like that, you are no longer 15 struggling through school. You haven't been 15 struggling through through school in 25 years, right? So getting a real strong, detailed history, I think, has been one of the most powerful things and learning the right questions to ask. Because if you don't ask, people don't ask questions at all. Like they're just like, Oh, how are you feeling? I'm fatigued. Here's some meds. Thanks. Bye. You know, they they don't ask, like, why do you think you might be feeling fatigued? Have you ever felt fatigued before? Do you have a history of infection of any sort? Were you up in the Northwoods in Wisconsin recently? You might have Lyme's disease, you know, like all these questions, like you have to get super invested in the person's story in order to peel it back and understand it. So that's really what it is. And so for me, there's two different people that I really love working with. The one is just wants to improve the health of their brain, right? The other one wants to get off of the psychiatric medication. And so getting off psychiatric medication isn't just, you know, here's what you have to do to reduce your medication, but yeah, it is unwinding the psychology of everything. Yeah, it is going through the grief. You've lost a lot of your life. What are you gonna be now? It is focusing on the pillars of mental health in the book, eat, sleep, move, meditate. It's yeah, all of that, okay. And reacquainting people with decision making on their own body is a big part of it because this whole time you have been offloading your decisions onto other people, you know? The doctor says, do this, therefore I do that. Right. So it's reclaiming your own personal agency and ability to advocate and just sense of self. So that is all kind of wrapped up into there. I do, like I said, I do functional lab work as well. Um, we look at functional neurotransmitter and cortisol levels, and you know, go get a physical examination. Yes. And in that physical examination, I'm also gonna add in a whole bunch of labs that I want your doctor to include to make sure they're there so that we know everything. Yeah. Because how often, you know, when you go to mental health, they're not even looking at your physical well-being. They're they're not even looking at any of that. It's all in your head. Well, I'm here to tell you folks, your head is connected to the rest of your body by your neck. Like, yes, it's all connected. It's done. And psychiatric medication doesn't know where your head is compared to your your gut or your heart. Like it doesn't know, it just goes wherever there's a receptor for it, right? So it's not a heat-seeking missile, which is why people are, oh, it's just a brain thing. And I'm like, it is not though. I know it is not, I know, you know. So wherever there's a receptor, that medication will go and impact. So, and those receptors are all over your body. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I can talk to you for hours. I I am so fascinated by your experience and and your education, and we're like so simpatico because I'm like, You're spit, you're singing my song, sister. I know, I know.
Speaker 1:I know. Hopefully it resonates with your listeners too. But I'm confident well. Yeah, I'm not gonna, you know, hijack this, but um, I am willing to give away a couple copies of my book to anybody, your listeners. That's it. If you wanna yeah, if you wanna have them do something, I don't know, you can decide what you want them to do to get it. So I'd be happy to happy to send them out for you.
Speaker 2:And I I would encourage people to buy it. Like it, it is so worth it. I've actually bought two, I bought I bought a physical copy and then I bought uh I had bought an electronic copy and then I started reading. I'm like, no, I need a physical copy. I need to highlight, I gotta go research this more. You know, it was just, it's so well written. It's so great. Thank you so much. I want everybody, you everybody needs to follow you. So where can they find you?
Speaker 1:Uh, so all of my social medias are the same. My uh TikTok, Instagram, Facebook are the the three big ones. Um and it's just all Dr D R underscore Terra Lynn, T-E-R-A-L-Y-N. I'm the only Dr. Terra Lynn out there, so you'll find me.
unknown:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's and you have like such great content on you know on your social media and that. And go listen to her podcast. It is, it is so good. And it's you have to, it's like this is this is your this is your red pill. Like if you haven't had your red pill yet, this, this, this will start that, you start you on that journey because the the guests that you have on there are so phenomenal, and it really does help kind of pull back the curtain and show us the great and powerful Oz for what he really is, right?
Speaker 1:We talk about everything, no holds bar on that show. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then go get a copy of her book, Your Best Brain by Terolyn Cell PhD. I will make sure all this stuff is linked in the show notes so everybody, it'll be super easy to find. Do you have one? What's one last nugget that you can share with?
Speaker 1:Listen to yourself. That's it. Listen to yourself. Don't take everybody's word for it. Listen to yourself, be curious. That's it. Don't ever stop. Awesome.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you so much. That's so great. Thank you so much. All right, until next time, upsiders. Thanks for joining me on the Upside of Bipolar. Your journey to recovery matters, and I'm grateful you're here. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. If you're ready to dive deeper, grab my book, The Upside of Bipolar, seven steps to heal your disorder. If you're ready to heal your symptoms, join my monthly membership, The Upsiders Tribe, to transform chaos into hope. Until next time, Upsiders.