Beat Depression Without SSRIs or Other Drugs

The ultimate how-to guide to obtain resilient mental health while boosting mitochondrial function instead of strangling it.

The first-line treatment for depression in modern society is SSRIs, but long-term SSRI use can cause sexual dysfunction, it can cause severe mitochondrial dysfunction in a rare subset of people, and years-long SSRI use leads to severe withdrawal syndromes becoming common and often leads to new-onset mitochondrial function that lasts years.

While 80% of psychiatrists would put a depressed person on an SSRI, only 40% of them would put themselves on an SSRI if they were depressed.

Even psychiatrists do not understand how SSRIs work: they think they are mood-boosting drugs that offer some kind of normalization or reset to the neurotransmitter effect of serotonin, but in fact they act through the whole body, have enormous impacts on mitochondrial function, interfere with the necessary benefits of intracellular serotonin and mitochondrial melatonin to mitochondrial energy production, and themselves enter cells where they can have disparate but sometimes powerful impacts on the sigma-1 receptor (beneficial but meant to be activated cyclically, not chronically) and themselves can act as mitochondrial poisons once they reach the mitochondria.

To make matters far worse, many people are prescribed SSRIs by general practitioners, who lack both an understanding of how SSRIs work and the expertise to do a thorough psychological evaluation of the person.

It may surprise you that SSRIs do not have a randomized controlled trial basis to justify the way they are used clinically, nor do they even have superior randomized controlled trial results to drug-free approaches!

For example, there are 52 trials in adults with SSRIs with the average lasting eight weeks, most lasting no longer than twelve weeks, and the longest lasting a year, and zero evidence justifying the average clinical use lasting five years.

While SSRIs have 52 trials and about 10,000 total subjects studied, supplements have 192 trials with just under 17,000 total subjects studied.

Psychotherapeutic approaches had 198 trials in adults with over 15,000 total subjects studied over a decade ago and have far more now.

Exercise approaches in adults have over 218 trials with just over 14,000 subjects studied.

So, just three classes of drug-free approaches to depression combined have twelve times as many clinical trials in adults as SSRIs have with almost five times as many total people studied.

What may surprise you even more — often a single supplement outperforms an SSRI when it is almost certain that a depressed person actually needs multiple corrections to their nutritional status.

This is often true in the average person without doing any testing, when individualizing correction of nutritional status would certainly provide superior results.

Nevertheless, these trials are not all of equal quality, and interpreting them is best done with biochemical and physiological expertise in how the treatments work to assemble how they can best be synergistically combined in different people.

Further, even some herbal medicines have impacts very similar to SSRIs and carry some of the same risks. Thus, understanding how the herbal medicines work and comparing their trials to the SSRI trials is necessary for safe implementation of a protocol.

To help you do this for yourself, or, if you are a health care practitioner, for your patients, I have analyzed the research and produced a 17-page how-to guide, How to Heal From Depression Without SSRIs or Other Drugs.

This synthesizes the best of a scientific and mechanistic understanding of how depression is caused and how to heal from it with an evidence-based analysis of the hundreds of randomized controlled trials showing human outcomes of improvement in depression.

This is not a review of the evidence. I will review the evidence in a separate article. This is strictly a step-by-step how-to guide.

It provides three approaches: a five-page guide to “throwing the kitchen sink” at it for people who need fast results; a three-page guide to “try it and see if it works” for people who want to engage the middle of the road approach between quick results and quality results; and a nine-page guide to “optimize it” for the people who want to invest time and money in a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race approach to secure the highest quality results for the long-term.

The Protocol Series

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