What is Integrative Mental Health?

The answer would take volumes to address completely, but the simple answer is that it is the bringing together of both Western and Eastern schools of thought, as in Integrative Medicine.   First it is helpful to understand the origins of Western Medicine.  Our modern day medicine is deeply rooted in the study of the physical body, which goes back at least as far as the renaissance period.  Even today, the medical classroom still includes the dissection of cadavers.  Think about that for a moment.  A dead body provides the substance to understand anatomy from the inside out; but what is missing?  The life force energy, chi, or prana is missing, which essentially describes the entire basis of Eastern Medicine.  Traditional Chinese medicine, such as acupuncture, and Ayurveda, which comes from India, are not just a few hundred years old, they go back thousands of years.  

The two disciplines of Eastern and Western medicine are as far apart as the two hemispheres of the planet, but they represent two sides of a complete picture.  Just like we would not do well to cut the earth in two, we don’t want to split the human condition in two either.  If you are having a heart attack, you wouldn’t just want an herbal remedy or dietary change, which would have been very helpful to prevent it.  But you would be very grateful for an emergency room and a surgeon.  However, when we just treat the body the results are often not effective.  Western medicine is designed to treat diseases so it often doesn’t even detect a problem until it has progressed in severity. Eastern medicine typically prevents and manages more subtle symptoms before they progress.   

Now let’s talk about mental health.  The western approach to treating mental illness starts with diagnosis.  Again, the problem has to be fairly severe before it is considered medically relevant, or reimbursable by insurance.  At that point it is often necessary to use medication and a person may be in therapy for quite a while getting to the root of the symptoms and changing ingrained patterns of thought along with automatic behaviors. This is typically accomplished through cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, which works well enough to still be the most common approach in traditional therapy, but it is only part of the whole picture of complete healing.  

Western approaches address the physical and the mental components of these disorders, but with certain limitations.  For example, increasing serotonin levels is very helpful in treating some types of depression, but there are ways to do this more naturally than medication with certain foods and supplements. Anxiety levels can decrease when someone uses cognitive behavioral therapy, for example using a rational truth to dispel a fear, but an individual also might need to increase their GABA levels, which is a neurochemical like serotonin.  Doctors tend to prescribe benzodiazepines, such as Valium or Xanax to increase GABA levels and this is not a good solution, especially long term.  Taking these medications is very similar in the brain as drinking alcohol.  When someone drinks enough for long enough what happens?  Yes, they are at risk for alcoholism.  Benzodiazepines are especially risky for individuals who have genetics or predispositions towards addiction.  This is one case where I especially find the solutions in Eastern medicine to be much more effective.  For example, yoga is a form of integrative mental health and research has even been done that has found it raises GABA levels in the brain and it significantly reduces anxiety.  What I found personally is that there are certain types of yoga and as we have westernized some of these eastern modalities they have lost some of the healing essence, so there is a little more to it than what you might find at the gym.    

Another example is post-traumatic stress disorder.  There are physiological changes that have occurred with trauma and the brain requires a great deal of support and interventions to rewire and bring inner peace to the irrational mind.  One can’t just tell their limbic system to calm down, like you would find in a cognitive approach.  That is like trying to reason with a one year old and convince them that mommy is coming back in just an hour.  This part of the brain doesn’t understand past or future; it is just in the present moment and if it has been triggered it believes that the danger is imminent.  In this case I like to say it is time to make a shift from medication to meditation.  In the practice of meditation I have found it is possible to reach the deepest origins of our fears and transform them, so that our limbic systems are in the presence of peace in each moment.   

Integrative mental health considers a more complete view of healing, which I describe as a diamond of wellness. The diamond has four facets: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. In treating an illness holistically, all four facets need attention.  When someone has been stuck for a long time in a state of low motivation, poor self-esteem, deep sadness, emptiness and low energy it will likely take more than a pill to change something so pervasive.  There is actually a type of chronic depression, called dysthymia that is considered treatment resistant, but the diamond approach is successful in healing even chronic depression.  

One facet is to look at the physical nature of the problem, which in the case of dysthymia isn’t so much an imbalance of serotonin, it is actually the dopamine or endorphin levels that are out of balance and these respond to a different set of solutions.  The second facet is mental aspects and with dysthymia there are almost always chronic negative thinking patterns.  There is much that can be done here, for example using daily affirmations specifically designed for each individual and a gratitude focus.   There is also a strong correlation with chronic depression and emotional atrophy.  This is like saying someone with 100 extra pounds of weight is also likely to have low muscle tone.  Someone with the emotional weight of chronic depression has likely not learned to identify and express what they are really feeling.  They usually have buried their emotions, but with support to bring them to the surface they find the key in lifting them out of that deep heaviness.  The spiritual side of healing is not necessarily about religion, although that background can inspire a spiritual awakening for many, myself included. The aspects of poor self-concept and the emptiness that go hand in hand with depression can go very deep. This level is often found and healed in the self-awareness and higher levels of consciousness that are also found in the eastern paths.  Our true nature is not our eventual cadaver; it is our spirit that existed before and that will continue on, beyond this physical experience.  That can be the very best suicide prevention there is, understanding that the core essence of this type of depression will not be resolved by ending ones’ life.  That essence must be healed here and now where it can and does change.  

The miracle of my life is that I found this type of complete healing.  It was not a quick fix, but it is one that has compelled me to become a healer and an author so I can share the miracle with others.   

Cristine Price, M.S., Author and Speaker, specializes in Integrative Mental Health; holistically healing mind, body, and spirit.   She has a unique slant on mental health due to her epic life progress, including recovery from addictions and healing from multiple mental illnesses.  Cristine has facilitated the transformation of over a thousand clients as a substance-abuse recovery specialist, school psychologist, and licensed mental health counselor. She has authored powerful self-help tools that continue to impact many lives. Learn more at www.cristineprice.com