Mental Health, Naturally


Book Description

With up-to-date research, illustrative examples, and a practical approach forindividuals and families, this handbook features an overview of mental healthdisorders, basic strategies for improving as well as preventing mental healthissues, and more.




Mental Wellness


Book Description

An authoritative guide on natural approaches to boost everyday mental wellness and provide extra support when you need it the most. This mental wellness book helps you manage stressful periods as well as other biological factors that impact your mental wellbeing. You’ll learn how to boost and holistically balance your mental state using natural remedies. Neal’s Yard Remedies: Mental Wellness is filled with holistic techniques, herbal remedies, essential oils, foods, exercise, lifestyle strategies, and therapies to empower you. This book offers: • The most comprehensive compendium of natural remedies for mental wellness on the market • Chapters on herbal remedies, aromatherapy, foods (including supplements), movement, and alternative therapies • A Symptom Checker which you can explore symptoms and access solutions in the book, based on your current need – jitteriness; anxiety attacks; acute stress; grief; low mood, etc • Approaches and information endorsed by Neal’s Yard Remedies, world leaders in natural, organic, holistic health. Learn techniques and mantras for uplifting your mood This beautiful, enlightening book explores how things like the environment, the seasons, hormonal shifts, sleep quality, and gut health can influence your mental health. Delve into how lifestyle choices can inhibit your mental health such as caffeine, alcohol, smoking, pollution, screen time, and isolation from the community. This wellness guide offers uplifting and informed information on why you may experience stress and anxiety, providing you with reassurance and strategies to combat these feelings. Explore the science behind natural remedies and use this book as a reliable resource for advice on mindfulness, yoga, breathing exercises, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and reiki. Expand your wellness collection This series of wellness books explore natural, holistic remedies to boost physical and psychological health and help you find the best solutions for yourself! Other titles in this series include Neals Yard Remedies Essential Oils and Neal’s Yard Remedies Complete Wellness.




Healing Depression & Bipolar Disorder Without Drugs


Book Description

When Gracelyn Guyol was diagnosed in 1993 with a mild form of bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, she was prescribed a commonly used antidepressant. Soon she developed breast cysts and benign tumors, a possible side effect of the antidepressant. She went off the drug and within two months, her tumors disappeared. Under the care of a naturopath, Guyol embarked on a quest to educate herself about the underlying genetic, hormonal, and other causes of depression and bipolar disorder. She investigated many natural therapies-including diet, vitamins, herbal treatments, and energy healing-before finding the solutions that have kept her free of depression and bipolar symptoms since 2002. Healing Depression & Bipolar Disorder Without Drugs features Gracelyn Guyol's own story and those of thirteen other people around the country who have cured their depression and bipolar disorder using only natural therapies. In-depth research and the expertise of alternative health-care professionals are included in this landmark guide for patients and caregivers seeking responsible, safe alternatives to psychiatric drugs.




The Chemistry of Joy


Book Description

Something about our modern way of life is making us sick. The antidepressants of old caused such painful and disabling side effects that the new sophisticated medications featuring fewer side effects seem to present an effortless solution to overcoming depression. Although depression requires physical intervention to correct the brain chemistry imbalance, author Henry Emmons believes that this physical intervention can be effectively achieved without medication. Many physicians and psychologists rely on medication as the first response to treating depression but medications are certainly not the only way to treat depression nor are they always the best way to provide the necessary physical intervention. Dr Emmons believes that it is crucial to treat depression with a diet, exercise and lifestyle plan that helps to rebalance brain chemistry. The programme as presented in his book, focuses on creating a pathway from depression to joyful living and shares a plan for each of the three types of depression: anxious depression, agitated depression and sluggish depression.




Activity for Mental Health


Book Description

Activity For Mental Health explores all activities, including physical, social, natural, cognitive, art/hobby and music as a means to both preventing and treating mental illness. This book not only reviews evidence-based research behind activity, but also explores how these forms of activity can treat mental illnesses. First, the reader is introduced to the concepts of Formal Behavioral Activation Therapy (BAT) and informal activity as an effective treatment option. Case examples aid in connecting the benefits to real life scenarios. Following the introduction, each activity is introduced in separate chapters, including physical, social, natural, cognitive, art/hobby and music. This book will provide researchers and clinicians the information needed to help customize treatment options for their patients suffering from mental illness.




Natural Environments and Human Health


Book Description

The role natural environments play in human health and wellbeing is attracting increasing attention. There is growing medical evidence that access to the natural environment can prevent disease, aid recovery, tackle obesity and improve mental health. This book examines the history of natural environments being used for stress-reduction, enjoyment, aesthetics and catharsis, and traces the development of the connection between humans and the environment, and how they impact our personal and collective health.




All We Have to Fear


Book Description

Thirty years ago, it was estimated that less than five percent of the population had an anxiety disorder. Today, some estimates are over fifty percent, a tenfold increase. Is this dramatic rise evidence of a real medical epidemic?In All We Have to Fear, Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield argue that psychiatry itself has largely generated this "epidemic" by inflating many natural fears into psychiatric disorders, leading to the over-diagnosis of anxiety disorders and the over-prescription of anxiety-reducing drugs. American psychiatry currently identifies disordered anxiety as irrational anxiety disproportionate to a real threat. Horwitz and Wakefield argue, to the contrary, that it can be a perfectly normal part of our nature to fear things that are not at all dangerous--from heights to negative judgments by others to scenes that remind us of past threats (as in some forms of PTSD). Indeed, this book argues strongly against the tendency to call any distressing condition a "mental disorder." To counter this trend, the authors provide an innovative and nuanced way to distinguish between anxiety conditions that are psychiatric disorders and likely require medical treatment and those that are not--the latter including anxieties that seem irrational but are the natural products of evolution. The authors show that many commonly diagnosed "irrational" fears--such as a fear of snakes, strangers, or social evaluation--have evolved over time in response to situations that posed serious risks to humans in the past, but are no longer dangerous today.Drawing on a wide range of disciplines including psychiatry, evolutionary psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history, the book illuminates the nature of anxiety in America, making a major contribution to our understanding of mental health.




Common Mental Health Disorders


Book Description

Bringing together treatment and referral advice from existing guidelines, this text aims to improve access to services and recognition of common mental health disorders in adults and provide advice on the principles that need to be adopted to develop appropriate referral and local care pathways.




A Natural Approach to Mental Wellness


Book Description

"Most models of Western Psychotherapy work toward insight as a primary objective, or try to help you change your thinking. In A Natural Approach to Mental Wellness, Gregg Krech asserts that psychological and emotional health have more to do with skillful means. Drawing on the principles of Japanese Psychology and Eastern Wisdom, Krech identifies four key skills that can be learned – Acceptance, Attention, Co-existing with Unpleasant Feelings, and Self-reflection. These skills are developed through practice – like playing the piano – not by talking (which helps us become better talkers). Becoming “skillful” is how we cope effectively with anxiety, depression, anger, shyness and just about any real-life problem we encounter as our life unfolds. Mastering these four skills can help us live a more purposeful and meaningful life, while being a bridge to spiritual life as well. This small book is both practical and empowering -- a radical departure from traditional models of mental health which offers us hope that our lives are not determined by a diagnosis"--Page [4] of cover.




Complementary and Alternative Treatments in Mental Health Care


Book Description

The widespread use of nonconventional treatments, or complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and the increasing evidence supporting their therapeutic benefits call for a concerted scientific effort to integrate treatments that work into mainstream medicines. Answering that call is the groundbreaking Complementary and Alternative Treatments in Mental Health Care, a concise, practical reference that reviews the many CAM approaches used in North America and Europe to treat -- or self-treat -- mental health problems, and the history and rationale for a variety of CAM treatments, including the risks and benefits of their integration into mainstream mental health care. Two dozen contributors with both conventional and nonconventional expertise present current information about safe, effective mental health treatments -- including herbals and other natural products, stress management, homeopathy, Ayurveda, and traditional Chinese medicine -- that have not yet been fully examined or endorsed by the institutions of conventional biomedicine. This book: Covers background issues, including conceptual and historical foundations, emerging ideas and trends, safety issues, potential drug interactions and adverse effects, and medical-legal issues pertaining to use of nonconventional treatments in mental health care. Reviews the evidence and offers practical clinical guidelines for the most widely used nonconventional treatments. Twelve chapters cover specific nonconventional modalities or alternative professional systems of medicine currently used to treat mental illness, addressing historical uses of the specified modality, significant recent research findings, unresolved safety issues, and evidence supporting use of the specified approach in common psychiatric disorders, from major depressive and bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and generalized anxiety disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder, dementia, and sleep and substance abuse disorders. Practical clinical applications of complementary and alternative approaches are discussed throughout the book. Closes with three appendixes and a subject and author index. Appendix A ranks evidence for the various treatment modalities by major psychiatric disorder and is cross-referenced with the material in Part II. Appendix B lists important Web sites, textbooks, professional associations, and other resources. Appendix C contains a glossary of key terms used in complementary and alternative medicine. Written for both conventionally and nonconventionally trained mental health care professionals, Complementary and Alternative Treatments in Mental Health Care provides both an ideal reference for clinicians whose patients inquire about the uses of many CAM therapies and a critical, balanced review of the nonconventional modalities most widely used in Western countries to treat mental or emotional problems.