hi Diane,

While I've experienced bone-crushing, soul-sucking, depression in years past, I had been able to wean myself off anti-depressants. However, I was still plagued with mild to moderate depression.

One thing that has really helped me, was getting an Organic Acids Test done. You can Google for this and see what the test can reveal. It basically is just a urine test that will attempt to assess the body's metabolic and detoxification pathways and pick up weaknesses. It will also make nutritional recommendations to help recover from those weaknesses.

I had this test done after my amalgam removal and it detected many things. And it sort of proved to me that my wanting to delay in beginning formal detox was a good thing because I have to bolster some detox pathways first.

But regarding the depression ... the test picked up that I was quite deficient in Vitamin B6, Magnesium and Tryptophan. It picked up the fact that I have a weakness in the the pathways that are responsible for Serotonin metabolism. And this can be a cause of depression.

Even though I'd been supplementing with B6 and Magnesium for years, I still wasn't taking enough. So my doc has placed me on nearly orthomolecular doses of B6, Magnesium and L-Tryptophan and the effect has been astounding. Now I only experience very mild depression when I've not had enough sleep or premenstrually.

Mercury is a huge endocrine dysruptor. It's placed me in estrogen dominance, exhausted my adrenal glands and impaired my ability to metabolize serotonin. All this has been discovered through functional testing. I'm so glad I've had the tests done so I can begin to support all these weakneses through supplementation, diet and bio-identical hormones. Then maybe I"ll be in a stronger position to do a formal detox some day.

SomedaySoon (Sharon)