What is Holistic Mental Health Care?

The first time I wondered about holistic mental health I was sent to a naturopath doctor who wanted to do hundreds of dollars of testing on me. It would cost me a fortune. They first wanted a long three hour session for about 350.00. I had depression, Part of my depression at the time was caused by financial distress. I was in college and just wanted to get through it.   They also said be prepared to have their testing and they were going to give me “their” products to buy. All in all it would have costed me over 800.00 -1,000.00 just for a visit. Truth is, any blood work I could get done by my insurance and Amazon and local health food stores have great prices on supplements. So why would I pay that much? That is not holistic mental health.

One of the reasons I got into the field was to make it affordable to people. Holistic mental health care stands for treating people outside the realm of traditional care. When I was working as a clinician, my first task was to assess people and then send them to a psychiatrist for medication. It is pretty much the standard. Grieving? Get put on drugs. Going through a divorce? Drugs will take care of that. Feeling insecure and not lots of self-esteem? Apparently there are drugs for that as well. Depressed? Seems like the ONLY option for that is a series of drugs. None of this is true.

I cannot say in my years of working mainstream counseling that pills helped grief, divorces, anger or mild to moderate depression. What I found really worked was spending time focused on health and wellbeing and look at thing such as diet, lifestyle habits, supplements, sleep, and exercise. The key factor here was spending time with the person. Listening, being in the person’s energy, looking for solutions not just ways to mask their symptoms, which is what medication does.

Holistic mental health understands that traditional medicine or psychology has a limited understanding and knowledge about the role of body chemistry in mental health and the impact of diet, nutrition, and chemicals in the environment on the brain. Mental health is extremely affected by issues such as food allergies, nutritional deficiencies, hormonal imbalances, hypoglycemia- low blood sugar, and thyroid.

Traditional medicine also overlooks the powerful roles that spirituality plays on the emotional body and aspect of soul, our connection to spirit should be taken into consideration in the process of healing. A good sense of spirituality promotes healthy self-esteem, better motivation, and helps people come to terms with powerful inner experiences. Medical studies indicate that spiritual people exhibit fewer self-destructive behaviors such as drugs, alcohol, gambling and risk taking behaviors. 

Addressing mental health issues holistically means being able to look at the system as a whole. Clients have an array of options in holistic mental health and are empowered with the fact that they have a choice in their treatment option. The client as well as the holistic health care provider work together as a team to make sure the body the mind and the spirit is being treated as a whole.