Posted by bleauberry on February 26, 2013, at 15:20:19
In reply to What works for severe anxiety and depression?, posted by PrettyLady on February 26, 2013, at 11:49:58
For immediate as-needed relief, get to a natural store and buy the tincture version of Lemon Balm. Try a half dropper to start with, mixed in a little water. Increase to a full dropper if that doesn't work, and go from there. Long term daily regular usage can lower thyroid, so we don't want that. But for emergency relief, it works. Then you can buy some time to think clearly and calmly what to do longer term.
This might sound bizarre, but what about adding Nortriptyline? The two meds go excellent together.
How do you know it isn't the zoloft causing the anxiety? Was that kind of anxiety there before you started zoloft?
Savella. I don't think you could add a large dose of this to Zoloft without serotonin syndrome risk, but smaller doses I bet would be fine. In Japan they combine it with Paxil and seems to be safe. Anyway, it has a strong norepinephrine component that, through feedback loops, can calm down the entire adrenal/adrenaline/stimulation/anxiety side of things. With 50mg zoloft, and you seem somewhat sensitive to meds, I would think something in the 12mg to 25mg range would be worth considering.
Have you ever tried the herb Rhodiola Rosea? If no, you really should. It is a decent antidepressant all by itself, excellent for anxiety despite it is basically a stimulant for energy, and combines well with psych meds. I would recommend the brand Thorne 100mg caps. I've tried most brands. Their doses are too high. The best quality I experienced was with Thorne or Jarrow. And it's cheap. It works.
Outside of direct approaches to immediate symptoms, I always believe other health strategies are extremely important for a couple reasons....reduce the body's load of other stressors because in doing so it often removes the roadblocks that are causing the meds to be so difficult. We're talking anti inflammation, anti toxin, and anti microbial. There are quite a few things that can cause your symptoms, so you don't want to just mask them with psych drugs, you want to eliminate them. We don't know what they are and never will, so we use the shotgun approach and do them all, since they are all healthy non toxic things to do anyway. Basically, any herbal strategy that works against lyme disease is going to have a likelihood of helping a depression patient get better, and even get a healthy person feeling better. That strategy is anti inflammation, anti toxin, and anti microbial. Depression and anxiety is, in my opinion, very likely coming from one of those sources, not from low serotonin or chemical imbalance or whatever.
poster:bleauberry
thread:1038890
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20130222/msgs/1038913.html