Over the span of my medical and writing career, I have received thousands of moving letters from women suffering from depression. Only within the past several years have I begun to receive reports from women with yeast-related bipolar disorder, in which the affected individual experiences powerful mood swings that range from "very elevated" mood (mania) to deep depression.
I think the story below, told by a New Zealand woman I call Martha, is especially heartrending:
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Martha's Story
Until l was 38, I never knew what depression was apart from a couple of very brief bouts. I remember once coming out with those terrible words, "What on earth has she got to be depressed about?"
Then it happened. I developed a pattern of manic depression, swings of mood from extreme highs to extreme lows. It lasted nine years and, ultimately, nearly cost me my life, smashed up my career and could easily have finished my marriage. It caused me unspeakable suffering.
Depression was like I imagined it would be having both legs amputated or losing an adored child - I often thought if it were to go on like this I'd rather be dead. But in the end, the prisoner without hope was rescued from the dungeon, so this tale has a happy ending.
Martha's illness started with a viral infection that caused liver damage. Although she apparently recovered from this illness, she developed recurrent episodes of mood swings. Two and a half weeks up, two and a half weeks down - that completely took over her life. Describing how she felt when depressed, she said:
Imagine the whole world spray painted gray or being in a small windowless cell or in a tunnel. I had no energy or drive whatsoever. I used to feel that I had 50-pound weights on each foot and - 30-pound weights on each wrist. All my favorite things suddenly became meaningless and sterile.
If someone had given me two round-trip air tickets to London and and $15,000 spending money, I would have been completely unmoved. Nothing could trigger a flicker of interest or enthusiasm.
... If Yul Brenner himself had purposely moved over to my side of the bed, I would have rebuffed him! I was sexually 100% dead.
Then, after a week or two of this hell, Martha would swing into a manic world of exhaustion and even delirium.
I was king of the castle, drunk with joy, bursting with crazy schemes, on the go literally 22 hours a day, talking nonstop, constantly interrupting, spending money like water, issuing dinner and party invitations, smashing up the car. You'd have to have seen it to believe it ...
I was diagnosed from the beginning as a "textbook case of manic depression." Over the whole depression period, I had been sent to a string of different specialists for what seemed quite unrelated conditions.
After struggling with this problem for eight years, Martha began to deteriorate rapidly and was put in a psychiatric hospital. Following discharge, she received therapy outside of the hospital, including medication and group therapy for many weeks and months.
Martha continued:
In spite of all the tears and the new insights, the manic depression didn't go away ... Then came the great breakthrough I'd waited so many years for. My general practitioner prescribed eight nystatin tablets a day for the candida, plus large doses of the B vitamins and calcium. The bouts of mania stopped immediately, the depressions became briefer and much less severe; within three months, they disappeared.
In addition, Martha found that a number of foods, including sugar, white flour and eggs, played a part in causing her symptoms. In her concluding comments she said:
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I can hardly believe it's really over. I feel tremendous gratitude that I've been saved from this living death. But I also feel angry that I wasn't diagnosed earlier ... Of course, I can only assume that the Candida albicans and its treatment with nystatin was the critical thing in my case. I can hear the doctors say, "You would have recovered anyway." But to me, it is beyond a reasonable doubt that candida/nystatin was the answer. It acts the only new factor after nine years of illness.
Now that I have been completely free of manic depression for a year, I plan to visit all the psychiatrists and specialists involved in my treatment over the past nine years to tell them what happened to me. Please, God, my sufferings might help others even in a small way ... the medical profession should get this sort of feedback. To find out more, you can check out How To Treat Candida.