A Personal Statement By Jordan Taylor
Following repeated severely traumatic experiences my freshman year of college, I found myself in a psychiatrist’s office for the first time. I was told this was going to be the person who treated the depression and took away my recurring panic attacks with a simple prescription of some sort of SSRI. I thought I knew what to expect because while studying neuroscience I’d taken a course that mentioned these “happy pills” and their mechanism. However, it was not until I tried them for myself that I realized these are not something people should just be throwing at all mentally ill patients as if they were candy.
I remember feeling extremely numb and out of touch with reality, desperate to feel any type of human emotion. Suddenly it hit me, I remembered being a young girl and my grandmothers giving me a teaspoon of honey here, a dab of essential oil there. Their homemade potions in the form of soup or tea made of fresh herbs, fruits, and vegetables. Those things worked like a charm and in fact, I dreaded going to the doctor’s office because I thought it was pointless.
Ironically, here I was at Michigan State University studying on a premedical track with a goal of becoming a medical doctor myself. I had lost sight of my upbringing and beliefs, trying to adapt to my new reality and achieve my goals. Since having that epiphany in the summer of 2017, I promised myself that I would not be the type of practitioner who just writes a prescription with little to no regard as to what the actual cause of the issue is. I became passionate about learning as much as I could about treating mental health problems naturally with a holistic approach. It is my hope that in the future no one will ever have to feel the way I felt while attempting to better their mental health. While I do wish that I had considered, researched, and known more about these natural alternatives and holistic approaches before accepting a prescription so quickly, I would have never found my true passion had I not.
