Natural Health and Nutrition

[Genevieve Simperingham]

Dr Julia Rucklidge PhD, professor of clinical Psychology at Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand, explains that optimizing nutrition is a safe and viable way to avoid, treat, or lessen mental illness.

This is one of those talks that I find myself wishing everybody in the world could watch. We desperately need to deepen our understanding and widen our approaches to preventing and treating mental illness, the gut brain connection can no longer be ethically ignored in the face of mounting research that points in this direction.

” Her interests in nutrition and mental illness grew out of her own research showing poor outcomes for children with significant psychiatric illness despite receiving conventional treatments for their conditions. For the last 6 years, she has been investigating the role of micronutrients in the expression of mental illness, specifically ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, anxiety and more recently, stress and PTSD associated with the Canterbury earthquakes.”

Again and again I see the clients who apply equal focus to healing and re-balancing through nutrition are those who have the best results – whether dealing with anxiety, panic disorder, PTSD, bipolar, BPD, depression, ADD, ADHD and ASD. Dr Rucklidge’s advice also resonates with own personal journey of healing from the negative impacts of severe childhood trauma and neglect and a whole host of resulting physical, mental and emotional problems. In my late teens, as well as beginning the journey of counselling, journalling and committing to being more tuned in to my emotional wounds, I also became a vegetarian and began cleaning up my diet, while tackling my addictions to unhealthy coping mechanisms like alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes and unhealthy foods. Nourishing the body makes the mental and emotional work easier, the emotional work makes it easier to make healthy food choices, it’s all connected.

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