Breathing essential oils for mental health: we're starting to talk about it.

We're starting to talk about it. Perhaps because we are also starting to turn more and more towards essential oils in hospitals. It doesn't go very far, but it's coming :)

Here's what I've seen on the subject.

This is something I've talked about many times before: conventional psychiatry doesn't work. An eminent personality, Dr. Anne Harrington proclaims this in her book Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, so we begin to pay attention to it and deduce that:

“Psychiatry as a medical discipline is a failure. Worse still, psychiatry constitutes a series of failures during its two centuries of history. The asylum movement of the 19th century failed. Kraepelin's descriptive psychiatry failed at the turn of the century. Adolf Meyer's pluralistic psychiatry failed, leading to an "anything goes" mentality, up to and including lobotomies. The Freudian Revolution ended in a “slow train wreck,” leaving psychiatry in embarrassing disrepute. And finally, the so-called biological revolution in psychiatry ended in failure, when pharmaceutical companies abandoned a profession “in crisis.”

We know well that apart from prescribing psychotropic drugs, a psychiatrist does not know how to do much.

However, antidepressants, particularly SSRIs, have proven to be an extraordinary and potentially fatal failure in the fight against clinical depression. No drug thus far created has been able to reverse the epidemic of Alzheimer's disease and dementia. And for good reason, these drugs maintain the toxic load which serves as a breeding ground for this degenerative problem. The more you take them, the worse it gets.

Parkinson's medications offer, at best, a controlled and inevitable decline. And standard pharmaceutical solutions for anxiety are highly addictive, as anyone taking Valium long-term can attest. Far from preventing suicide, they led to an 11% increase in the number of people committing suicide while receiving psychiatric care. I saw this clearly with my son's 12 friends, ex-marines, who committed suicide while taking this type of product to treat their trauma and anxiety.

It's one of the reasons the pharmaceutical industry hasn't produced a single new drug for mental illness in a decade - a tacit admission that the chemical solution to a whole host of mental illnesses doesn't reduce suicides or the increasing incidence of depression.

But there is hope for patients suffering from a number of mental disorders in a most unlikely place: aromatherapy. Although for us aromatherapists the value of these oils for treating emotional suffering is no mystery, new scientific studies confirm that inhaling essential oils from a wide range of plants can also help heal the brain. .

So there is proof!!!

Accumulating evidence has shown that these essential oils, when inhaled, bypass the blood-brain barrier via the olfactory nerves in the nasal cavity and pass through the nasal-brain pathway to directly target brain tissues, particularly the amygdala , the primitive emotional pathway in the center of the brain.

These oils directly affect the thalamus, cerebral cortex and limbic system (involved in emotion), which in turn play a central role in depression and anxiety. This is sort of what I explain to you in my latest book: “ Breathe, Love, Heal”.

Researchers have recognized that essential oils contain hundreds of active compounds that have direct effects on both the immune system and the central nervous system, and therefore the brain. Maybe one day they will also discover everything else, explained by psycho-neuro-endocrino-immunology.

Meanwhile, they recognize that although the oils affect the same pathways that pharmaceutical drugs target, they do not carry the same litany of side effects or even increase the risk of suicide, as many do antidepressants and antipsychotics. Which is huge!!!

Once inhaled the oils enter the bloodstream via the lungs, where they activate the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body and a highway between the brain and every major organ.

This nerve, which controls both the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, tends to be out of balance in various mental problems and usually in a constant state of alert.

But new research has shown that many essential oils can calm and restore proper regulation of the vagus nerve, which can in turn extinguish inflammation and overcome conditions such as depression and anxiety.

Other evidence shows that good vagal “tone” can also cure diseases like Alzheimer’s, dementia, and even Parkinson’s. This is just the tip of the iceberg!

I explain the rest to you in my book here.

If you have already had the opportunity to experience the power of essential oils on your emotional balance, tell us all about it in the comments!