Toxicity and Mental Health

8 comments
Heightened anxiety was one of my first clues that something was wrong in our home. Of course I didn't pick up the clues. It's only in retrospect that I see how the growing level of toxicity adversely affected my children.

Suddenly my elementary school age children were obsessed over quizzes, worried about being late, anxiety-ridden over homework. Other symptoms emerged. Paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, personality changes, and depression. Emotional meltdowns became a daily part of our life. We found it difficult to make decisions, even small ones. We had a tough time filtering out various types of sensory stimulation.

Only now am I seeing how clearly toxicity is related to mental health.

Dr. Laura Mark, a Board Certified psychiatrist, writes about this in the book Surviving Mold. Her health began to deteriorate in 1995 at the age of 40, when she joined the staff of a state-run psychiatric hospital. Over the next five years she developed stabbing headaches, itchy rashes, joint swelling, fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands, abdominal pain, mood swings, difficulty concentrating, and memory loss. Others in her workplace complained of similar symptoms. She left the position and experienced improved health, until she took a job at a 200-year-old satellite clinic in a rural town. Her story continues from there. A story of compromised indoor air quality, declining health, and the impact of musty, moldy conditions on the clinic's patients.

Dr. Mark writes,

How much of patients' anxiety, apprehension, irritability, mood swings, explosiveness, cognitive dysfunction, neurologic (i.e. seizure and movement disorder) symptoms may have resulted from pre- or post-admission exposure? In the worst-case scenarios, how many of our long-term folks inevitably became long-term patients, with their life confined to an institution's four walls as a consequence of exposure to the water-intruded, chemically-saturated indoor air quality of the very institution charged with facilitating their recovery in a "safe" setting?

Dr. Mark has a passion to share the medical evidence linking inflammatory responses, and the resulting mental health impairments, with compromised indoor air quality.

She even looks back and sees that her health issues began during her childhood, long before her toxic encephalopathy was diagnosed in July 2007.

Might my genetic susceptibility to a whole host of toxic triggers (particularly musty, moldy, moist places) have contributed to the years of stuttering, crying, shyness, intermittent brain fog, irrational anxieties, and sleep disturbances? Were these things due to an underlying inflammatory response syndrome? Was I a "crybaby," or were those things a result of where I lived and went to school, what foods I ate, or what air I breathed?

Imagine what was happening to my patients' children, so often misdiagnosed and mislabeled, pigeonholed. If a teenager had an episode of suicidal gesture at age 15, that history was the first thing recited in a subsequent psychiatric evaluation. Yet if her gesture was due to frustration, sadness, chronic pain, and cognitive issues from exposure to a moldy bedroom, would we still label her as an adult with depression just because she had ideation of suicide years before?

I'm learning. I see so many themes now, starting from the need to educate physicians, the need to get the word out, the need to protect my patients from moldy buildings, and to preserve my own health. The learning has so many dimensions.

Indeed, education needs to happen at so many levels. It's easy to miss the signs of toxicity and focus on behaviors and mood issues. Who better to help us learn than a psychiatrist with the experience and dedication of Dr. Laura Mark?

8 comments :

  1. Thank you Andrea for the post! I wish the whole medical society...no everybody would read this and understand the intensity of this issue!

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  2. AMEN!!
    We had the same. It has been 12 years of recovery for us, and I never cease to be amazed at how I am able to "control" the moods, energy and school performance of my kids with diet and supplements. I feel that nearly ALL of my kids' friends have similar issues, though none of their families have connected the dots with their environment. How tragic! Andrea, keep spreadin' the word! Someday the subject of indoor air quality will get a foothold in the media and perhaps people will begin to open their eyes.
    Amanda

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  3. Andrea,
    Thanks for posting your "Surviving Mold" excerpts by Dr Mark. She has remarkable experience, clarity and grasp of the trail that biotoxin exposures take, beginning with medically untrained/ignorant missed diagnosis in childhood, and the destructive, agonizing path the adult suffers, along with their baffled providers.
    Based on the groundbreaking work of Dr Shoemaker, Dr Mark brings an informed, simplified and gentle touch to the medical basis of this condition, providing hope and non-partisan solutions for the patient, provider and community. I hope the word gets out to those who need it the most, and their community.

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  4. Thank you for sharing this post, Andrea; such an informative one, and I look forward to quickly receiving my ordered copy of "Surviving Mold."

    Although I had already lost the hair on my legs by 2004 after working in a WDB for 14 or so years, I believe that the illness really grabbed hold of me after the basement area in which I primarily worked in was vacated in 2004 and remodeled; and that's when we discovered the deterioration of the outer, cinder-block wall and found the mold. By 2006, I was ashamed of myself for the way that I was reacting to things, especially in the work place. I would lash out in rage, and would then be extremely sorry. In 2007, I had surgery for both DeQuervain's and Carpal Tunnel Syndromes on my right hand; and in 2004, I had had a lateral release and a cyst removed from the same arm. And I do not believe that it is a coincidence that neurological testing has shown deterioration in my right arm/hand, decreased eyesight in my right eye, and decreased hearing in my right ear. BTW, the vents (Dirty air system, I should say) were always on the right side of my desk at work.

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  5. Thank you, Andrea, and thank you, everyone, for your helpful insights and information. i cannot wait until others, especially the medical profession, understand this link between mold and health - emotional health, intellectual health, and physical health. think of the prevention that could be done. ANd the understanding that would be there for people with mold-related emotional and memory symptoms.

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  6. Thank you Andrea, yes all the puzzle pieces are starting to fit together my daughters movement disorder and siezures my sons stuttering and anxiety my depression anxiety my inability to cope with the smallest of tasks. Things are getting better now we are healing

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  7. Another post script - the actual mold was believed to be mucor, because of all the antiobiotics and prednisone, they were able to grow a couple of strands, along with actiomyosis - they continue to call it aspergillus...neverthe less after intense anti-fungal and antibiotics, I am in good shape today. However, just underwent surgery 2 weeks ago for early uterine cancer - although estrogen dependent...did the mold exposure speed the cancer thing along? We may never know, but I feel that I've dodged a bullet for the second time in one year.

    Thank for you this forum and hopefully the message of environmental mold exposure and diagnosis will being to take hold in the US. One final comment, my homeowners insurance will no cover my unpaid loss time from work since in their words..."they have paid in full under the terms and conditions of our policy."

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  8. Thank you! You have no idea how reading these posts help me NOT feel so isolated and INSANE. People don't understand, especially when you are saying your child is ill MENTALLY and they are saying it is just adolescence... Mental illness is related...I've lived it and am recovering. It truly is a NIGHTMARE... Black mold so bad it looked like dust and I never understood what it was...

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