Supplements Are A Thing
And it’s worth knowing about, because your clients might bring it up.
ETHICS NOTE: Don’t recommend them! That’s outside our boundaries of competence!! If you want to help clients in other areas, become a teacher of how to recognize credible sources and read the scholarly literature!
Here I’ll give you some research about mental-health related supplements that have happened to come up from my clients recently (links attached, of course!!). Probably this will end up being a series, but who knows?
- St. John’s Wort – best known as an antidepressant, it turns out it works as well as prescription antidepressants (SSRIs). And a general positive shift in emotional processing, even with non-depressed people.
- Mixed results for OCD
- May be useful in helping with withdrawal from benzos?
- Note: interferes with hormonal birth control and may cause mania !
- Magnesium – seems everyone’s talking about how magnesium is good for sleep and maybe muscle recovery, but it turns out it might be good for depression, anxiety, and general wellbeing!
- Fish Oil – good for… everything? Depression, anxiety, cognition, the ADHD literature is mixed
- Melatonin – Just see the melatonin post ! 🙂 Additional note to that post – Exogenous (i.e., the kind you put in your body) melatonin spikes high and then plummets. Endogenous melatonin rises through the evening through your first hour of sleep and then maintains a steady amount until you wake up and slowly decreases. Best natural melatonin improvements come from pulling off the “brakes” of blue light in the evening!
- Also, if they REALLY want to take it, at least have them take it at sunset, for crying out loud.
Comment below: Any supplements your clients are talking about, that you’ve looked into? Share your info! Anything you’d like me to look into for a future post?