This Level of Ignorance Should Leave You Indignant - Mental Health Case Study
Let’s take a look at a common scene of mental health for young teenage girls in America. We’re now going to meet a bright young lady named Ashley who is 15 years old.
The Standards of Mental Health Care in America Are Inexcusably Broken and We Need Massive Reform.
💥 Today I’m going to use a bit of storytelling with a case study example of our broken mental health system. I believe the more we know, the more we care, and the more we care, the more we can take corrective action to move society in the right direction. Call it indignation, call it conviction.
Either way, this story should leave you feeling something…
🔥 Sometimes when I sit down to write, I don’t know what’s going to reveal itself from the page by the end of my writing time. But when I feel something inside me nagging at my conscience to be released, I have to listen. When this happens, I often get lost in my work and lose track of time as if I black out along the way. It’s an interesting experience of flow as part of any seasoned writer’s creative flow.
What you will read below is what was left on the page once I finally came to wake up after getting lost in telling this story.
🌟 My hope is that it helps shine some light on a situation that happens far too often to the people we love. I hope you are energized COURAGE and clarity to dig deep and rethink your current perspectives on mental health in America and take the time to read and share to continue the conversations that are absolutely necessary to push for the changes we need to see.
💯 I believe everyone deserves to know the truth. So the truth I will continue to speak about on this topic rather than letting our discussions and debates remain in the shadows while countless people continue to suffer unnecessarily.
🤝 Perhaps together we can actualize positive change out of all this.
👇 Join me and continue reading below. When you are done, please consider liking, commenting, and sharing this post while adding in your own thoughts and perspectives along the way. I know you have wisdom to share too.
Thinking Critically to Connect the Dots of Mental Health & Wellbeing
Here’s what we know but continue to ignore across most healthcare systems.
🧠 We know that Nutrition plays a HUGE role in Mental Health, but most people are undernourished in several key nutrients while dealing with increasing levels of inflammation and oxidative stress inside the body AND the brain. Do you think most people improve the quality of their diet and lifestyle to positively support their Mental Health?
“Over the past decade, there has been a steady increase in epidemiological studies investigating the relationships between dietary patterns and mental states. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have shown that the more one eats a Western or highly processed diet, the more one is at risk for developing psychiatric symptoms such as depression and anxiety.” — Julia Rucklidge & Bonnie Kaplan
🥑 We know that Nutrition plays a massive impact in someone’s Mental Health, but do you think most psychiatrists are making an automatic referral to a nutrition professional, dietitian, or health coach to support someone’s internal vital nutrient needs?
💩 We know that a big piece of the Nutrition conversation is the impressive role of the Gut Microbiome, but how many psychiatrists are ordering a poop test for their patients?
🧃 We know that a big piece of the Mental Health conversation is the surprising influence of environmental toxins, yet every single day we observe thousands of advertising influences, food “products,” artificial colors, dyes, sweeteners, and an endless number of additives being hosed at our children, teens, and young adults. No wonder they seem to be drowning in ultra processed foods, which have been repeatedly linked to higher rates of depression and anxiety.
🍟 We know that a big piece of the Environmental Toxins conversation is the wild effects of heavy metals and pesticide residues and the repeat offenses of heavy metals found in baby food and junk foods, ultra-processed foods, and even still some city, school, and local drinking waters. Glyphosate exposure can impact the fragile barrier in the gut lining, known as the endothelial. Endothelial cells form a single cell layer that lines all blood vessels and regulates exchanges between the bloodstream and the surrounding tissues. “Leaky Gut” aka intestinal permeability is a real issue, especially here in America. These toxins that pass through the fragile gut lining can elicit a panicked immune response and even pass through the blood-brain barrier.
🌎 We know that the human body & brain are infinitely interconnected, but healthcare still works as if these are separate continents on the map with no shared dialects to improve outcomes strategically and methodically for all people in all sorts of ways for all sorts of conditions.
🧠 Might we consider a short-term and safe use protocol of the Ketogenic diet with the addition of detoxing from heavy metals for individuals with PTSD, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder? Might we consider looking at pathogens and infections for kids with PANS/PANDAS? Might we finally start to realize that we humans require real food, real nutrition, and anything shy of that is an abhorrent distraction perpetuating our abysmal mental health concerns in this country and globally.
🦠 Neurological considerations must also be considered for problematic pathogenic issues as well, such as the psychiatric effects seen in Lyme Disease and Mold-Illness-Toxicity aka Sick Building Syndrome (SBS).
🧩 The same considerations can be made for situations related to diagnosis of OCD, ADHD, Autism, and ASD-adjacent.
🍩 We know that nearly 90% of Americans are metabolically UNhealthy. Well, my friends, metabolic health IS brain health. They are not separate, and they cannot be divorced from one another.
🧬 You see, they are forever married together via the many bidirectional pathways that circulate nutrients, hormones, neurotransmitters, and other communication signals back and forth along the gut-brain axis, listening and learning, and rapidly adapting every step of the way.
👂The brain listens to the gut and the gut listens to the brain.
⛓️ Your thoughts affect your feelings, and your feelings affect your thoughts.
🍽️ The state of your gut health influences the state of your mental health.
💭 The state of your mental health influences the state of your gut health.
🧚 These are not whimsical fairytale notions. These are absolute realities we must honor and understand if we hope to truly transform the lives of others for the better…
💪 At least that’s what I’m after. I don’t know about you… but that’s what I’m after and that’s precisely what I will continue to do.
📚 CASE STUDY EXAMPLE 👀
Let’s take a look at a common scene of mental health for young teenage girls in America. We’re now going to meet a bright young lady named Ashley who is 15 years old.
Because Ashley is a teenager being raised in America, it is most likely that she has been chronically undernourished in particular nutrients such as zinc, iron, magnesium, omega-3s, vitamin D, and even B-vitamins as well for many years. “Nutritional vulnerability increases in adolescence due to heightened nutritional requirements, yet the quality of the diets consumed by this age group often deteriorates significantly.”
Many teenagers today have been told by Instagram algorithms that thinness is healthfulness, which of course is simply not true. Ashley has not been impervious to such suggestions. She started seeing many more posts about diet, food, and fitness when she first went online to Instagram at age 12.
By the time she was 15, she had seen so many videos advocating for the vegan diet that in hopes to do her part to stop the world from slaughtering animals, she had committed to eating an animal-free diet herself. Her algorithm had never given her different positions on the topic, such as the story linked below, but rather Instagram’s analytics kept pushing further emotionally driven videos about animal cruelty alongside the normal women’s wellness, diet, and trendy fitness posts.
We 'need to eat meat' for mental health, says top Harvard professor
Eating meat is essential for warding off depression and anxiety, claims Dr Georgia Ede, a Harvard-trained nutritional…www.dailymail.co.uk
As an American teenager, she likely has been struggling with at least some form of mild to moderate anxiety. Which for Ashley, all seemed to start initially when she was almost 9 years of age. She also tends to experience mild depression in the winter that seems to slowly resolve itself by the time school ends near the end of Spring and beginning of Summer.
🩸 During a routine biannual checkup at her doctor, Ashley has has minimal conversation with her physician and as usual, is ordered the average minimal blood work labs covered by her insurance. Because the young lady seems to be at an okay weight (if not mildly skinny), the doctor doesn’t have any concerns, “so no worries about obesity or diabetes” the doctor thinks as she quickly scans her chart of hundreds of boxes and criteria she has to look over for each of her 34 patients today.
Over the years, all of Ashley’s labs have always been reported via a quick one-line follow up message from the physician over the digital health app used by the local hospital, “looks good, no concerns.” This is standard care when the standard labs come back all “WNL” also known as “within normal limits.” So of course, the family listens to the doctor and trusts her judgment. They wouldn’t know what else to ask or even consider, after all, they are not doctors or have the level of training of the physician.
Yet, Ashley’s parents still wish they could do something more to help their daughter when it comes to her mental health, as they know Ashley is getting older and stress from school is going to increase as well as social pressures. So, they muster the courage to ask the doctor about other options, “because Ashley still isn’t feeling well inside… she’s not like her old carefree self anymore…”
The physician hears the comments from Ashley’s father while speedily typing away at her computer. Then the doctor swiftly proceeds to make the only referral she possibly can due to hospital and insurance constraints to offer one of 2–3 different medications for Ashley to try for the next couple months. These medication suggestions span anywhere from “treating anxiety” or “treating depression” even though the direct drug manufacturers state that most scientists don’t know exactly why this drug seems to help treat depression or treat anxiety, but somehow it helps… according to their studies at least.
Per standard of care, Ashley was also placed on birth control aka “the pill” to help with her acne and “regulating her period.”
Together, the parents and physician and Ashley decide which particular medication to try first. The one they chose is just one of many medications brought to market by just a few companies in the pharmaceutical space that hold many patents and equally hold many fines and lawsuits to their name, who have paid billions of dollars back to consumers for falsifying research evidence, making extravagant marketing claims, illegally incentivizing physicians in the past, and have taken their own previously patented drugs off the market due to extreme side effects that later came to light (only after their patent expired of course).
💊 This young lady starts the medication her doctor prescribed and continues on her merry way for the next few years of her young adolescence.
Meanwhile, her chronic lack of vital nutrients lingers behind the scenes. The state of her systemic inflammation in her body and brain remains. Her sleep quantity and quality only get worse as school work demands pick up and gets more stressful, not to mention the extreme pressures at her high school to try to fit in. She also feels that she carries these seemingly unachievable expectations on her shoulders to always be happy and bubbly, despite how desperately she simply just wants to feel better inside and for life to be simple again. She hasn’t felt truly joyful and free since she was eight years old. And every year since, it seems she has had a little less pep in her step and little less vitality she is able to grasp during her everyday life.
Around 6-months after starting the medication, she started having worse digestive issues that left her feeling bloated with additional upper GI stomach pain. After another visit to the doctor, she was prescribed a common anti-acid medication, as the doctor presumed it was “just simply acid reflux, and should resolve itself with help of the medication.”
Just about 9-months after the initial medication was started for her mental health, her parents were still worried and concerned that things weren’t getting much better and decided to get their daughter some additional support with the chance to seek counseling. So, after thoughtful conversations with her mom and dad, Ashley started a schedule of counseling at an office nearby that had advertised that they “specialized in teens, adolescents, and young adults.”
Time began to fly by over the next few months with busy schedules for everyone in the household and somehow Ashley and her parents became unexpectedly divided and distant from one another. Still, wanting to trust the doctors, and wanting to trust the counseling professional, “after all, they have degrees and stuff so they must know what they are talking about,” they decide to just stick with it and see how things look in a few more months hoping things will turn soon. They choose to commit to the process, remaining optimistic for better outcomes.
Now, 12–months after the initial consultation for her mental health, Ashley is taking 3 medications, one for her mood, one for her period, and one for her digestive issues that never seemed to resolve at all, seeing her counselor almost weekly and growing further apart from her parents. If you didn’t know behind the scenes of Ashley’s story, you would think she would be thriving in this season of her teenage years.
After month two of counseling, Ashley’s parents did start to see some significant changes in their daughter, though not the kind they had hoped for. Now, things felt even more concerning than before.
She began isolating herself from her parents and stopped asking them to take her to counseling altogether. Instead, she was now taking herself to counseling and sharing less and less about what was discussed or how counseling was even going. And due to protections around individual’s health and medical information, neither the doctor nor the counselor was going to share any notes or details to the parents as the daughter had decided to take personal ownership in her care plan and decided to end the proxy reporting to the parents.
Her parents feel lost, they feel broken, and they feel most of all hurt by all the hurt they see their daughter still walking through. They simply want her to thrive and flourish in this world, and yet she still seems to be struggling day in day out, season after season. Despite the smile that Ashley puts on at school, her parents can read between the lines and remember the little girl they raised that had always been described as a “bouncy little butterfly” when she was little.
Meanwhile, each week in the office of the counselor, Ashley was informed of some “hidden trauma” that was left around the girl’s childhood that the counselor was quick to address. Per usual, as Ashley and the counselor talked, it seemed that the inevitable blame fell on Ashley’s parents for most if not all of her current woes and frustrations during this difficult stretch of her adolescence. Week after week Ashley and her counselor, Bridget, continued to meet, becoming more friendly with one another as they pressed on to discuss the “problems” with Ashley’s parents and how most of her pain inside her mind, body, and spirit were all manifestations of unresolved trauma from her childhood connected back to how her parents “treated her like a princess” according to the counselor’s observations. Even with the digestive symptoms Ashley was facing, Bridget helped Ashley understand how they “could very well be suppressed emotions of anger and bitterness” she was holding on to.
Skipping ahead, A few years later, this young girl Ashley is no longer so young and is off at college, only coming home to see her parents once or twice a year. She has pretty much stopped talking to her parents minus the small check-in around the holidays and if she’s in a jam needing some extra cash for books or school supplies.
☕ While in school, she starts to party on the weekends as most kids do while in college, drinks too much coffee with her girlfriends as most girls do while in college, and still struggles to get even 4–5 hours of sleep each night as most students do while in college.
Meanwhile, her internal health conditions have persisted, but Ashley has become very skilled at hiding them from others. Her symptoms have just gotten worse over the years, but only her parents seem to notice.
Now, what if things could turn around for Ashley at this pivotal stage of her life and career. What if she could finally receive the kind of care she deserved from the very start? Well, let me elaborate on this a bit…
If Ashley were able to sit down with the right kind of physician to look her in the eye and do a thorough and comprehensive exam with further health metrics and biomarkers to assess, this physician would be able to see just how much inflammation and oxidative stress Ashley has been dealing with for so long. Ashley and her doctor could finally discuss more details about Ashley’s nutrient levels that have been terrifyingly low since she was a tween. They would have data to see how her adrenals were overtly dysregulated. They would have the chance to talk more to connect some of the symptomatic dots together regarding why her mood and emotions had been sporadically all over the place without any sense of stabilization except for the last few seconds before she falls asleep during her afternoon nap on Wednesdays and Fridays between classes.
This medical provider, most likely trained in functional medicine, lifestyle medicine or integrative medicine would hold Ashley’s hand and empathize with her well, as she had faced several similar symptoms when she was in medical school and had the time and energy in her calendar to share more with Ashley to connect at a deeper level. This physician could also schedule a follow up to discuss many more details about how diet, lifestyle, and environment all impact Ashley’s mental health. Ashley could receive additional testing for understanding her hormones, her genetics, further explore the possibilities of total body toxins that may be preventing Ashley from fully healing inside and even set up regular appointments with a dietitian or nutrition professional who specializes in nutritional psychiatry and knows how to help Ashley nourish herself well in mind, body, and in spirit.
The doctor would go on to share with Ashley that yes, she understood why her vital energy feels nonexistent and why she tends to feel stuck in a relentless bondage of constant fight-or-flight that directs her entire day from the time she wakes up to the time she goes to bed.
The thing is, this kind of care is available. These insights and connections are valid, true, and published. Sadly though, this kind of care is not used as standard care. Truly, the standards of mental health care in America are inexcusably broken and need massive reform. From my vantage point in my own little niche neck of the woods with a keen eye to observe the best kind of care strategies, the level of ignorance we allow for and engage with on a regular basis in standard care is downright inexcusable.
So, let me ask you…
🧐 Do you think Ashley young woman was given the care she deserved at 9, 10, 11, 12, or even 15 years old? Do you think she was presented with highly personalized care plans presented with human empathy by a qualified medical doctor who could actually help her?
Or was she simply seen as a number and sifted through the broken system that has been infamously described as “diagnose and adios?” 👋
Sadly, this story is one that probably hits home for many families out there today. This story is so very present and pervasive for our current teens and young adults in school systems today. As I’ve said before, our current standards of medicine around mental health are severely broken and outdated, poorly structured for incentives only promoting drugs and pharmaceuticals to kick the can down the road without ever truly transforming people’s lives for the better.
💸 Truly, in our current system it behooves the market leaders between junk food companies, vape and alcohol behemoths, gambling games, and flagrant pharmaceutical giants to EVER actually help someone get better. Their bottom dollar DEPENDS on people being sick, addicted, and forever dependent as lifelong customers sipping on a slow drip of their products slowly sucking the lifeblood out of our communities, our households, our families, and our loved ones we say we care so much about.
So, to all my readers who are STILL with me here, I implore you to fight the good fight for the radical philosophical change that is inexplicably required across all aspects of food, mood, mental health, and vital wellbeing.
✊ We need as many good players on our team as possible. This is fuel to the fire for the movement to make the radical change for transformative medicine to actually help people heal. I know each of us can partake in a small piece of the radical redesigning of health and lifestyle in our own personal lives, but we must continue to lead, to educate others, and to share the truth about the broken pieces of our broken system if we ever hope to help heal the sick and treat those in need.
What I also hope we can strive to achieve is a welcomed wave of education and empowerment that rises up as a preventative, preemptive wall of insight and communal power to better understand how we can support one another in our communities with hand-to-hand combat against maleficent systems misaligned from anything even resembling “healthcare” that remain as malignant life sucks of our unalienable human potential for life, health, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness and the opportunity to thrive and flourish on this side of heaven.
🙏 Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading.
Thank you most of all for leaning on the right side of history. For standing up for truth. And for fighting for real health and healing for yourself, your children, your family, and your community. There is much room for improvement. There is much work to be done but as they say, many hands make light work.
✌️ Peace and Blessings to you as always. 💫
Much Love Fam 💙
Health and Happiness are not sparked overnight. Life is a journey and we all deserve a little encouragement from time to time. Here’s my encouragement to you for you to continue striving to live your best life.
ZigZag Nutrition represents the pursuit we share as we strive to live this life as best as we can, learning and growing, flexing and adapting along the way to better align ourselves to the most nutritious life and lifestyle that meets our needs and nourishes our body, mind, and spirit - together.
Thank you for being here. Please consider sharing this story with a friend or use it as a catalyst for conversation. See you next time! 🤙
