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Depression and allergies DEPRESSION AND ALLERGIES
For millions of people, depression is a living hell. Traditionally associated with middle or old age, it also afflicts young people as well. Depression can ruin childhood, blight marriage, destroy careers, and wreck plans for a happy retirement. Indirectly, depression can kill, since it is responsible for many of the suicides in our country. Depression is marked by lethargy, disorientation, melancholy, and/or unresponsiveness. The depressed person is usually rational, but can lapse into paranoid or deluded thinking.
Few medical problems are as difficult to treat as depression. A number of procedures have been developed, such as electroshock therapy, psychotherapy, and drug therapy. There is no need here to dissect the successes and failures of these established methods. Each of them has had its vogue, and new drug therapies (such as lithium chloride for manic-depressive disease) come along periodically. What many of them have in common, however, is a symptomatic approach. They attempt to relieve the results of the disease, rather than discovering and eliminating the underlying environmental factors which are responsible.
The treatment of depression by the methods of clinical ecology has been successful, on the other hand, because it concentrates on discovering causative factors. As with other manifestations of allergy, the responsible exposures lie in the physical and chemical environment of the patient. This would seem to be the most obvious place to look for the source of an illness, yet most doctors never consider the actual, material surroundings at all. It is easier and more lucrative to treat symptoms.
Depression can be either a minus-three or a minus-four symptom, depending on the degree of severity. It is the end of the line for many individuals who are maladapted to their environment. Depression rarely strikes out of the blue. It is preceded, in most cases, by a prolonged period of illness, including both stimulatory reactions and lesser withdrawal reactions.
In fact, the alternation of extreme stimulatory symptoms (mania) and extreme withdrawal symptoms (depression) is well recognized in the medical literature as "manic-depressive disease." In this illness, the patient's mood changes from "highs" to "lows" quite rapidly. There is an ever-increasing tendency, however, for the "down" periods to crowd out the "up" periods. Depression becomes more and more the rule, while the overexcited manic phase becomes less frequent and less prolonged. While this disease is recognized in its most extreme form, doctors generally fail to see the alternation of stimulatory and withdrawal symptoms in less advanced cases.
Both depression and manic-depressive disease can be the result of environmental factors such as commonly eaten foods and chemicals. The two illnesses can occur alone but more commonly are found in conjunction with a long list of other symptoms in susceptible persons.
It has long been suspected that some persons are depressed because of reactions to nonpersonal environmental exposures. My first demonstration of this was a motion picture filmed in 19501 and reported preliminarily.2 Hydrocarbon exposures were demonstrated as causes of depression in 1956.3 Confirmation and extension of these observations of the effects of given foods in highly susceptible persons led to a scientific exhibit at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1956 and the founding of the Section on Allergy of the Nervous System of the American College of Allergists in 1957. This was called ecologic mental illness in 1959.4 Numerous subsequent reports are listed in a bibliography, which will be provided upon request, as mentioned earlier.
Others, especially Donan and associates,5,6 Speer,7 Mackamess,8,10 Mandell and Scanlon,9 and Philpott and Kalita,11 have published in this area.
It so happened that these observations of the causative demonstrable roles of foods and environmental chemicals in depression and related mental illnesses were first noted in 1950, the same year that psychotropic drugs became available to physicians. Since these mass-applicable approaches were promoted vigorously by their manufacturers, the highly individualized approaches of clinical ecology did not receive serious trials for several years until the hazards associated with psychotrophic drugs became more apparent.
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Allergies
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