Re: “Crazy Pills”

It's so hard to read everyone's bad experiences with this when you have had a good one. But the good experience hasn't come without doing my homework, being consistent, and approaching it empirically. I think comment wars are pointless, but I have to say what happened to me (and my wife). If I learned anything at university, it was to be a critic of MLMs AND of hyperbolic claims. I'm skeptical of anything with claims so large. I was skeptical of the whole thing for over a year. My wife struggled with depression off an on, a few times she told me that we needed to do something or she was going to kill herself. That was really hard to hear, and I wanted to figure out what to do. I was STILL skeptical of the EMPowerplus, even after watching the Discovery Channel documentary on this and reading the abstracts of the 25 clinical studies in peer reviewed journals (including one from a Harvard psychiatrist). I suggested that we just give the EMPowerplus a good try, recording everything in a journal for a month. But my wife started feeling better and getting excited about things in life, so we kind of forgot about it all. She wasn't taking anything at all and we just stopped thinking about it. Then, out of the blue, my wife had a psychotic episode (never happened before in her life) while at a conference in Florida (without me). Though she was delusional, she made it home safely. I was confused at what was going on because of her strange behavior. Then she became very dangerous to herself and I decided to hospitalize her (probably the most traumatic thing I have ever gone through). I thought I had lost my wife. She was bonkers. She thought I was God and that the nurses were angels. In normal life, she was an amazing business woman who built an online retail store that made $10,000 revenue in one day, a massage therapist, a business coach, and a pageant coach who coached the last 3 winners of Miss Utah. And all the sudden, boom she believes that the hospital is a spaceship. I thought our life was over. After the shock wore off a bit, the doctors told me that she would come back with some heavy psychotropic drugs (zyprexa and lithium). I wouldn't believe them until she actually came back. I visited her the second day and she was still gone. She recognized me, but it was too hard for me to deal with her behavior, so I didn't even stay the whole time. The next day though the meds kicked in and she called me and asked me why she was in a hospital and that she wanted to come home. It was refreshing to hear this. Two weeks later she did come home, with a DSM-V diagnosis of Bipolar I (the more severe kind). The doctor told me that she should stay on lithium for the rest of her life. He also said that having kids would put us in a really high risk for a relapse. I was just happy that she was back and she wasn't delusional. Then real life began again. And though she wasn't delusional, she was miserable. The lithium turned her into a different person. She was always discouraged and she couldn't even read without getting overwhelmed by the words. They said it would just take time. Probably every other day, she was telling me that she didn't want to be alive. She got acne all over her body, hot flashes, slight weight gain, and her face felt like it was going to explode every night. She's 26 and beautiful. She is also an entrepreneur (like me). This was tearing her apart because she had dreams to do a lot of amazing things. She couldn’t even send a text message, let alone think about running a business. This is why I decided to take a leap of faith and try (very slowly and with the help of a coach and doctor) to transition off of medication onto something that didn’t cause her head to feel like it was on fire. So we jumped. It was more like gradual and empirical move from medication to natural supplements. I read a book called Med Free Bipolar that helped me probably more than anything else. All the people who talked about the EMPower plus working, didn’t say anything about the rest of the body. But this book said you need to fix your GI tract before you can even absorb any of the nutrients in the EMPowerplus supplement. We went all out and took things to rid her body of any possible parasites, and then started using a very potent probiotic to help with absorption. Then we started to slowly, transition from the high dose of lithium to a high dose of EMPowerplus. It was a balancing act as we lowered the dosage of lithium and carefully monitored the reaction. I honestly don’t know how anyone could do it if they didn’t work from home like I do because we had some days where it was really scary. But I called the transition coach every single day. It took us almost two months, but she is now completely off lithium and is now on EMPowerplus, a probiotic, vitamin D-3, and Typtophan (natural sleep aid). It wasn’t easy. I honestly believe that it takes a while for the brain to reach a point where it is absorbing and utilizing the nutrients it needs. Like I mentioned at the first, I am an empiricist. I’m a researcher and I have been published in the journal of Mindfulness for my work on the Implicit Association Test (IAT). I monitored my wife every day with every dose. I wrote down every reaction, good or bad. I recorded hours of sleep every night and even how often she had bowel movements (both critical for mental health). People can say what they want about the EMPowerplus formulation, but we have been on one of the most traumatic mental health rollercoasters that can anyone can ride (overcoming full-blown psychosis is not a simple task) and we are out of it in large part because of the EMPowerplus formulation. From an empirical standpoint, there isn’t any other reason. I don’t need a double blind placebo controlled study to show me that my wife is no longer psychotic after receiving a full blown DSM-V diagnosis of the most severe case of Bipolar. Do what you will, but we don’t choose the life that lithium gave us. She is now reading full books, smiling and laughing every day and about to start a new business. I have my wife back. She is excited about life again. She doesn’t have any of the side effects and she believes in herself. I left out a lot of details, but I have said more than most comments here. I hope this helps someone because this post ranks on the first page of Google. If you try EMPowerplus, do it right. I would be willing to bet that all the people who have horror stories don’t do it right. They come off their meds cold-turkey (very stupid and dangerous - it took us over a month to slowly wean off of 1200 mg of lithium), they take too low a dose of EMPowerplus, they never even think about fixing their digestion, they don’t think about sleep patterns affecting the brain, they don’t have a transition coach, they don’t record it in a journal, they don’t have support of others around them who are monitoring, their doctor usually doesn’t know about it. Show me a horror story of someone who did every single one of those things right, and I would be very surprised. That’s my opinion. Be careful people. This is serious. But life is much better off meds.