How targeted nutrients can help support better mental health

As well as traditional care approaches and medications, there’s an opportunity to integrate natural therapy techniques to help boost outcomes. An often-overlooked approach is the use of targeted nutritional support to help enhance the impact of a patient’s other treatments or to counteract its side effects. Qualified practitioners use their knowledge to deliver evidence-based treatments that fit individual’s needs.

Common mental health challenges facing Australian families

Millions of Australians negotiate mental health concerns every day – the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) estimates 22 per cent of the population has experienced mental ill-health in the past 12 months.

The parents of young children are commonly included in this group, with one in five women facing conditions like postnatal anxiety or depression.

This group often faces additional barriers in finding support, including financial barriers, finding family support, or having to take care of young infants on their own.

A particular area of focus is mental health support for this group, and what approaches we can take in conjunction with psychiatric medications to get the best outcomes for patients.

How natural health practitioners can help mental health 

Taking an integrated approach to supporting patients with mental health concerns is essential. Fields like psychiatry, psychology, occupational therapy and speech therapy all lean on each other to help get good outcomes for patients.

Fields like naturopathy and nutrition also have a role to play. These practitioners look at the patient as a whole and what they require for all their systems, not just their mental health.

This involves taking a broader approach and considering what support patients might need in other areas, for example their gastrointestinal health.

Natural health practitioners can also examine the current medications patients might be taking and explore ways to lessen side effects or enhance the effects of medications they are already taking.

This involves looking at how good nutrition and high-quality vitamins and minerals can be integrated alongside medication. The focus is on how we can work with a patient’s diet, lifestyle and prescriptions to get the best outcomes.

What is ‘Nutritional Psychiatry’?

Nutritional psychiatry is an emerging field that looks at how mental health outcomes can be better supported through diet. It includes considering how different nutrients help to protect our blood-brain barrier and how nutrients might help reduce neuroinflammation.

There is room in every patient plan for some component of nutritional psychiatry. In today’s world, these approaches are considered important because everyone is stressed – symptoms of depression and anxiety can crop up in everyday life.

When addressing mental health conditions, the key targets are neurotransmitters. There are so many different amino acids, vitamins and minerals that can be used to target those pathways and get better outcomes.

By looking at how nutrients can protect neural pathways and how they affect our neurotransmitters, it’s hoped that full-blown anxiety attacks or depressive episodes can be prevented.

As people learn more about supplements and different herbs, there’s an increasing interest in using these approaches to supplement existing medications for mental health conditions.

Creating a bespoke nutrient-focused approach

There are lots of nutrition and “superfood” trends on social media, but qualified naturopaths and clinical nutritionist take an individualised approach to your care.

Natural health practitioners do a lot of myth-busting in the clinic and often debunk poor quality information that they have found online or through social media.

The professional approach is individualised, so every single client walks away with a different prescription based on their needs. These prescriptions carry high-quality evidence and have been modelled in humans. Everything that is done by professionals is evidence-based and results-driven.