Hi I'm Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy, and today I want
to talk about something a lot of people who had trauma as a child are
experiencing now and that's depression. Everybody gets
depressed sometimes in the more general sense of the word
but there are also more serious forms of depression which everybody knows and the
last time I was seriously depressed was over 25 years ago when I was attacked on
the street, I had a head injury, I lost an important relationship and my mom died
like all in the same couple of months. And I talk about this experience a lot
because it's that crucial time in my life where my childhood PTSD got
overwhelming and then by some kind of luck I was shown the daily practice that
I'm talking about and teaching all the time on this channel, the techniques for
writing fears and resentments and meditating afterward that I credit with
healing my PTSD and saving my life. And since I started using those techniques,
depression has never hit me in that serious way again. Yet almost every time
I see a doctor they suggest I take antidepressants, they push them for
everything from stress to headaches to foot pain to insomnia to hot flashes and
even though I tell them over and over again that short of imminent death I
would not want to take antidepressants. I treasure my brain chemistry. My health
plan has changed many times since 1994 so no providers today can even imagine
what I used to be like or how incredible it is that I recovered and I'm okay. But
I know how precious my well-being is and what a miracle it is that I recovered
from the depression and the childhood PTSD and I expect if you could measure
my brain chemistry back then compared to now there would be significant changes. I
love my brain and everything that it allows me to do, it allows me to know
things, to have intuition, to sense when I've made a mistake, when I've been
wronged, when something good is in front of me, I trust my brain and I stay busy
showing other people how to heal their brains as well. There
are many simple proven strategies to treat depression and anxiety yet the
myth that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance has driven three
decades of progressively growing and not very effective mass medication of the
population. More than a quarter of women my age in the United States are on
antidepressants and more than one in seven people overall. In the UK it's one
in six! Even little kids are on them, more than ten percent of kids in the US are
on psychoactive drugs. Now I'm not a scientist, I'm not a therapist or a
doctor and I do know that for some people medication has been a literal
lifesaver but this many people taking that many
drugs cannot be a good thing. So what happened? The explosion of
antidepressants started in the late 80s when prozac hit the market followed by a
long series of ever more profitable new drugs. The new antidepressants arrived
just as health insurance plans began to cut mental health benefits which created
demand for a quicker cheaper fix that long-term therapy, which had previously
been reimbursable to mental health providers, well now it wasn't anymore. And
psychoactive meds do sometimes help people, for providers though, it feels
good to help suffering people feel better so the incentives for liberal
prescribing began to pile up for clinicians who might have once been
reluctant to suggest mind-altering pills to so many people. Now first this shift
from face-to-face care to pills caused an outcry but pretty soon people just
accepted it, doctors, therapists, virtually everyone just accepted it. We started to
see beautiful perfect families in colorful gardens advertising
antidepressants on TV and at first those machine gun disclaimers about how they
may cause diarrhea tremors dry mouth and sudden death they just it seemed like a
parody and it made us laugh but soon we just tuned it out we just accepted the
idea that millions of us just needed a little tweak to be our best self. It
seems so plausible right? It just seems so normal but here's the thing, we're
talking about drugs with less than great effectiveness
and serious known side-effects; suicidal thoughts or attempts, loss of libido,
rapid weight gain, just for starters and a slew of possible correlations with big
things like road rage, relationship failure, contaminated water supplies and
even mass shootings. Now again I want to acknowledge that some people really do
have serious depression and anxiety and other mental health problems and that
medication can be life-changing and life-saving, I know a lot of people who
are living with mental illness. All the same, it's my opinion that the medication
"epidemic" is having a terrible effect on us overall, specifically on our culture
and on our understanding of how to meet life's problems to sense our affect on
other people and to develop our own capacity to live a meaningful and joyous
life. It's my experience, in myself and in the hundreds of other people whom I've
helped in my non-professional calling as a childhood trauma fairy, that most
depression and anxiety and a lot of physical health problems for that matter
to stem from negative emotions that are stuck inside like guilt, shame, resentment
and fear. These are what I call spiritual toxins and not out of some woo-woo
interpretation but because they're so demoralizing and so limiting in terms of
letting us become ourselves and they have a physiological expression too, they
poison our thinking, our behavior, our physical health, and yes our brain
chemistry. It makes perfect sense that a disturbance in here will have
manifestations in here right? So we know this. People in the past may have had a
damaging effect on us but they can't fix it now, it's we who have the opportunity
to face what was done to us and then what we have done and begin to clear up
the shame and the guilt and the resentment and the fear that were
generated by all of it. There are some things in there that we can heal and
loosen that grip of depression so that we can be more ourselves and
more who we're meant to be. And while for some people it's really important to
stay on medication, it's not for everyone and either way it's possible to lighten
the load of negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors. For me it
started with the twin practices of writing and meditating, which you can
learn about by clicking the links in the description section below. If you like
this video let me know by clicking that like button, like that, and if you want to
get notifications every time I post please subscribe, I've got tons of videos
coming up and if you want more tools and stories and videos and courses, do go to
my website at crappychildhoodfairy.com I'll see you in a few days.