To listen to Julia Rucklidge TedTalk, please click here.
"In 1847, a physician by the name of Semmelweis advised that all physicians wash their hands before touching a pregnant woman in order to prevent childbed fever. His research showed that you could reduce the mortality rates from septicemia from 18%, down to 2% simply through washing your hands with chlorinated lime. His medical colleagues refused to accept that they themselves were responsible for spreading infection. Semmelweis was ridiculed by his peers, dismissed and the criticism and backlash broke him down and he died in an asylum two weeks later from septicemia at the age of 47.
What I am going to talk about today may sound as radical as hand washing sounded to a mid-19th century doctor and yet it is equally scientific. It is a simple idea that optimizing nutrition is a safe and viable way to avoid, treat or lessen mental illness.
Nutrition matters. Poor nutrition is a significant and modifiable risk factor for the development of mental illness. According to the 2013 New Zealand Health Survey, the rate of psychiatric illnesses in children doubled over the last five years. Internationally, there’s been a three-fold increase in ADHD, a twenty-fold increase in autism and a forty-fold increase in bipolar disorder in children. And this graph here shows there’s been a four-fold increase in the rates — the number of people who are on disability as a direct consequence of an underlying psychiatric illness. The rates of mental illness are on the rise.
So how are we dealing with this problem? Currently our health care system operates within a medical model. Now this means that you would typically be offered psychiatric medications first followed by psychological therapies and other forms of support. Our reliance on medications as a frontline form of treatment is evidenced from the increasing rates of prescription. For example, in 2012 half a million New Zealanders, that’s one eighth of us, had been prescribed an antidepressant, that’s 38% higher than five years previously."
"Julia J Rucklidge, PhD is a Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Originally from Toronto, she did her training in neurobiology (McGill) and Clinical Psychology (University of Calgary). 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."
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