“I’ve always suffered with anxiety but now I’m hearing voices, they’re always derogatory, always criticising me.”

Donna explained that she used to use Cannabis recreationally, but she stopped because she felt that it was what caused these voices. Mainstream medicine hadn’t helped her at all and she ended up in hospital with a breakdown.  Now recovered from that she was looking for a more natural way to heal.

 “I was scared out of my wits in hospital, it felt like the nurses were all against me”

“When I was sent home I was too scared to go out, it feels like I’m going to hyperventilate when I’m outside, anybody could do anything to me because it feels like they can read my mind”

“I’ve overdosed a few times, it’s like there’s nothing to live for”

“I need to get rid of this mental health malarky, get back to being a proper person”

Donna explained that she had a very narrow range of feeling OK – when I asked her to explain that she said that everything had to be exactly right or she felt worse.  Too warm made her feel ill, too cool made her feel ill.  Being on her own caused anxiety, being with too many people caused her anxiety – and so on; and she was well aware that the problem was with her.  She also had another problem:

“I felt very neglected as a child, that’s turned me into a very angry person”

In between all of this anger and anxiety Donna told me that as she no longer was able to hold down a job so she spent her time helping the homeless, she had so much empathy and such a strong desire to help those whom society looked down on.  Many of her days seem to consist of going out and helping and feeding people, which considering her own anxieties was amazing to me. She laughed and joked about her life, rarely dwelling on how low she got at times.

I prescribed a remedy called Mercury, it not only matched her actual symptoms and suicidal tendency but also:

• Her inner belief that things were her own fault pointed me to a mineral remedy
• There’s a lot of anger against other people in mercury, they can often feel that those who are actually helping are out to harm them
• It is also a remedy with an awful lot of aggravations, things have to be just so to keep them in their comfort zone
• They laugh and joke about life, often being very entertaining
• They are offended easily and have a very low tolerance to others

Two weeks later Donna called and reported the following while she was walking along to deliver some sandwiches for a friend she’d made on the streets:

“The voices have subsided, they are much more distant and I can block them out most of the time.  Also they are not as mean and crude.”

“My memory is still rubbish, it hasn’t helped that, I’d like you to sort that out now.”

Well, Donna hadn’t mentioned her bad memory, although that too is part of the Mercury picture, and I had to explain that we needed to wait a little longer before repeating the remedy, or looking for another one.  “Be patient” I encouraged, we will get there, but let’s go gently.

Donna laughed, “Being patient is not part of my DNA” she told me, “I just want to take another one – it’s like magic”

I saw Donna again a few weeks later, and she is doing remarkably well, even though she was taking much more of the remedy than I’d have recommended.  At the moment, we’ve agreed she will phone each time before repeating the remedy and I will try to curtail some of her enthusiasm for taking it on a regular basis!  That said, it is helping her so much.  In the past 3 months she has stopped all her medication (again, all done with her enthusiasm and impatience to move forward and against my recommendation to go slowly), she is feeling so much better and the voices are hardly bothering her although they’re not completely gone and she is now considering the change from relying on benefits to building her own business.

She has taken far more of the remedy than I’d have thought wise, and yet I can’t deny she’s doing brilliantly on it. So, again, a great learning curve for me and as homeopathy is such an individualised form of medicine I’m interested to see how much more Donna’s life will improve over the next few months as she continues to plunge forward a little recklessly but with huge enthusiasm.

If you are suffering from anxiety and would like help, please get in touch with me by phone or electronically for a chat.

As we’re now well into our second lockdown here in the UK and facing a very different Christmas I have recently talked to lots of people whose mental health has definitely been affected by all that is going on.

Some people are understandably anxious about things such as their job, money or their children’s future but many are just depressed about the whole situation.  Commonly I’m hearing things such as:

‘I have no motivation to do anything’

‘I’m beginning not to care if I get it or not’

‘I’m just going through the motions; I feel no joy anymore’

‘I don’t see an end to this, life just sucks’

I have myself dipped in and out of similar feelings, it is not great – but it is the world we live in, and I am convinced that joy is still to be found in our individual journeys, and we need to get that joy back.

Homeopathy does help lift you out of these feelings.  It is in fact an amazing remedy at healing our mental health, and  whilst using mainstream drugs does usually provide temporary relief, they come with a cost and often that cost is a more serious problem down the line, or at the very least a dependency on that drug forever.  Homeopathy only heals, there is no dependency and there are no side effects.

As homeopaths we don’t prescribe remedies on a named diagnosed disease, but instead look at how you experience that disease and how it affects you.  Each of us are unique, and with something like depression whilst we will all experience some of the same symptoms, such as low energy and a low mood, we will also experience these things in our own unique way.  Some people want to just sleep their lives away whilst others can’t sleep at all.  Some people are lifted by seeing friends or going out, whilst others just want to be left alone.  Also, the apparent cause of your symptoms is interesting to us and those things, together with many other individual symptoms will help us as homeopaths come to an individual remedy for you.

Usually I like to suggest a few remedies for you to consider for yourself at this point, but I’m a bit reluctant to right now, because the right remedy will make all the difference and as we have around 6,000 remedies to choose from there is too much involved to make any sort of accurate suggestions.  However, I will suggest one remedy as you can easily see if this one matches how you are at the moment.  If you don’t feel like this remedy will help you right now, do please get in touch and we can have a chat about how homeopathy can help you.  The remedy I’m giving you today is:

Ignatia

We often think of Ignatia as our ‘grief’ remedy, and although there are actually many grief remedies this one will invariably help somewhat when we do grieve.  We all accept easily that when we lose a loved one we grieve, but some of us suffer a similar grief when we lose a job or when our child leaves home.  I recently prescribed it to a lady who described her failing health in a way that fitted this grief picture and it worked wonders.

Some common indicators for Ignatia are bottling your feelings up then weeping – you are experiencing an emotional roller coaster and feel very sensitive.  There is often a lot of sighing, almost an attempt to gather your courage with a deep breath and control yourself.  There’s a feeling of shock and fragility, and sleeplessness is very common.  If you feel this fits your symptoms then I’d recommend you try Ignatia 200C and repeat as necessary.

If this remedy doesn’t seem to fit how you feel, get in touch with me and we can chat about how homeopathy will help you feel the joy again.

For most of my life I believed that healing tooth decay was impossible and that the only way to sort out our dental problems was to visit a dentist and expect a filling or extraction.  However, I’ve discovered that we can heal tooth decay and solve other dental problems, both through diet and supplements and by using homeopathy. Read More

I consider myself one of the least anxious people around, but drive me along a cliff edge or threaten me with a dental appointment and that changes completely.   Fortunately, the things that cause me anxiety can, for the most part be avoided or even eliminated from my life but I’ve spoken to so many people who feel that high level of anxiety doing what we might think of as every day activities, and as you can imagine, that is not only debilitating, but it sucks all the joy out of life.  The best description I had of experiencing this level of anxiety was from Simon, who described his experience: Read More