Desperate Cries for Help and the Copper Toxicity Doctors Missed

The youngest of three girls, I grew up in a seemingly normal environment. I was a happy-go-lucky and caring child, smiling despite the sometimes debilitating monthly menstrual pain that started in my late teens.

At twenty-three, I married a divorcé seven years my senior, who had a young son. Immediately, my life became engulfed with exhausting drama as he and his ex fought over visitation and child support. As my stress rose, my monthly menstrual pain worsened. Seeking medical help from a gynecologist, I was prescribed birth control pills to minimize the pain. The birth control pills were a blessing for relieving the pain and the sometimes excessive bleeding. However, suddenly, I felt a new feeling of high anxiety and fell into despair.

The feelings of overwhelm, fatigue, and a profound edge of agitation quickly intensified. Not being able to focus at work, I went home and ingested a number of pain pills from the medicine cabinet, attempting to stop the awful feeling. When my husband came home from work and saw my listless body on the bed and pills on the nightstand, he yelled, “What have you done?” and called an ambulance. The hospital induced vomiting. As I sat in the emergency room, I saw my parents rapidly walking toward me with concerned faces. When they entered the room, I cried, “Daddy, I don’t want to die.” I was scared and did not understand why my world had suddenly turned upside down.

Later, in a hospital room, I was seen by a psychiatrist who would only release me if I had someone to be with me 24/7 until she felt I was safe to be alone. Shocked by the reality of the situation, I reached for the hand of the only person standing next to my hospital bed, which was my husband. That one reaction led the psychiatrist to assume my marriage was not an issue, and all our follow-up visits in her office revolved around discussing my childhood. But I had no bad childhood experiences to reveal. Rather than take antidepressants, I instead exercised to raise my endorphins, which helped with the depression but not the anxiety.

I felt like a failure, embarrassed by what was labeled an attempted suicide, while trying to cope with the edginess of anxiety that loomed over me because I was still taking the birth control pills. Married life continued to be challenging, with added domestic responsibilities, entertaining a stepson every other weekend, an ex-wife provoking my husband, and then my mother-in-law moved in with us. We both worked long hours to make ends meet, which for me was a welcome distraction from the chaos at home.

At 34, I gave birth to a daughter. My anxiety, which had been controllable, increased along with the return of depression. I did my best to manage it with exercise again to avoid psychiatric drugs. My symptoms were persistent and caused friction between my mother-in-law and me. No one, including myself, linked my depression to postpartum as it continued to linger for months with new-mommy fears.

Five years later, with a second pregnancy, the anxiety became intense, and fears increased as my husband was focused on his goal of early retirement and not displaying interest in our unborn child. The anxiety progressed into OCD behaviors, gradually driving me into adrenal fatigue. This pregnancy was more difficult than the first. I had lower abdominal pain and back pain that radiated down my legs. My OB-GYN said it might require an ortho evaluation if the pain worsened. Managing the pain, my career and home demands became overwhelming.

I told my OB-GYN that I was struggling and didn’t know how I was going to manage a new baby, too. She said I would be fine and that she managed with all her kids. It didn’t seem she was understanding how intense my feelings were. As I sank further into depression, I started missing my appointments because I was barely functioning. At the same time, I had to deal with the decision of “putting down” our sickly family dog because my husband was passively refusing to help with the situation.

After work, I’d pick up my daughter from daycare, make dinner, and then collapse on the sofa, unable to move. It was when my husband yelled at me to get up because I had a daughter that needed me, and I literally couldn’t move, that I knew I couldn’t endure any more. Every ounce of me felt heavy. Struggling alone with no support or interest in this pregnancy from my husband, I asked my OB-GYN for the name of a clinic to terminate the pregnancy. My OB-GYN stated that I should never regret my decision, but that my thinking might be clouded by depressive feelings, and she gave me a prescription for Prozac. I questioned taking Prozac during my pregnancy, and she assured me of the safety while also giving me the name of a psychologist and a clinic if I chose to abort.

Seeking relief, I filled the prescription and trusted that there would be no problem taking the drug while pregnant. But I imploded, seven days after starting Prozac. Delusional thoughts about something being wrong with my baby surfaced. So I scheduled an appointment for my husband and I to see the referred psychologist together. When my husband told the psychologist, “I can live with it, but I will have to work a few more years,” exaggerated fears that I was ruining his life emerged.

The psychologist ignored him. I’m unsure if it was because she had shared that she was going through a divorce and seemed to be biased against men, or if, unlike me, she recognized his statement as self-absorbed. She told me it was my decision, and that she would be there for me no matter what I decided. There were no comforting words that everything would be okay, or confidence that I could make it to full term, nor was there any discussion of potential regret if I chose abortion. I felt alone, making a decision I had no business making in my state of mind.

The emotionless and dulling side effects that progressed from the Prozac led me to resort to a single time of cutting, to ease the emotional pain I had no control over. Aware and scared, I reached out to a psychiatrist for help. Rather than acknowledging that I was in severe depression, he scolded me for cutting myself, telling me I could have gotten a staph infection. Because I was a functioning depressive, no one was recognizing that my mental health was so bad that I probably should have been hospitalized. The Prozac continued to distort and catastrophize my reality, so I scheduled an abortion. As I sat zombie-like from the drug in the waiting room, my husband said, “Are you sure you want to do this?” I wasn’t sure of anything other than that I felt alone and disconnected, with no one to hug me or offer any words of comfort.

For a couple of months after the very traumatic and excruciating pain of terminating the pregnancy, I had follow-ups with my OB-GYN. Those visits were agonizing as I sat in the waiting room with smiling pregnant women. I told her how I felt comatose, with a heavy veil over my face and extreme fatigue. Then, when I started to have flashbacks and night terrors, reliving the termination over and over, I stopped going to her and sought out a new psychiatrist who said the Prozac was too high a dosage and changed my prescription.

The trauma of the abortion caused PTSD, and for the next seven years, I attempted to get help from doctors who prescribed different drugs with varying dosages, including Effexor, Klonopin, Wellbutrin, Alprazolam, Clonazepam, Adderall, Zoloft, and Lexapro. I was miserable on these drugs, feeling numb. My marriage was never the same, as I struggled with a lack of self-worth and cried myself to sleep every night. I lived with so much shame and guilt after the abortion. I threw myself into my career as a distraction, but all those prescribed pharmaceuticals cognitively impaired my once strong mental functioning. It wasn’t long before embarrassment and even anger led me to give up the career I had worked so hard to cultivate.

I’ve always trusted doctors’ medical knowledge, but I couldn’t take it anymore. The drugs were doing little to nothing for my depression and worsened my anxiety. I had a racing mind and panic attacks, while at the same time, I felt drained and numbed, along with side effects of weight gain and brain fog. I just wanted to feel again, even if it was not a good feeling.

So, with determination, I took my health into my own hands and went off the prescribed pharmaceuticals cold turkey, despite the doctor’s advice not to. For months after stopping the drugs, I experienced agitation and tingling from the withdrawal while trying to manage a household and be a good mom to my daughter. My husband, occupied with his career, had no clue what I was enduring, and I’m not sure he cared to know. The love for my daughter was the only thing that got me through those years. It was a life of existing, not living, as all my energy went into trying to manage a good childhood for her while being unhappy in my disconnected marriage. I was too broken to manage on my own, so I stayed.

I became accustomed to managing the fatigue and anxiety. Then, when I entered menopause and struggled with night sweats, hot flashes, and frozen shoulder, an endocrinologist prescribed hormone replacement drugs. Suddenly, the feeling of depression reared its ugly head along with brain fog. Not wanting to go back on antidepressants, I found doctors who treat depression and anxiety naturally with targeted nutrients.

These new doctors tested via blood and urine and discovered that I am estrogen-dominant, and that’s why the added estrogen from birth control pills threw me for a loop. It was also why I was reacting to the hormone replacement drugs. They said my hormone-related symptoms were because I have a dysfunction where my body doesn’t metabolize copper properly. My postpartum depression was a result of copper coming in to support my pregnancy (copper levels naturally rise significantly to support the rapid development of the fetus) on top of prenatal vitamins with copper, and when I became pregnant the second time, the copper from my first pregnancy was still there, and the new copper layered on top of it, causing a build-up. When the excess copper had nowhere to go, it overflowed into my brain, disrupting my neurotransmitters.

They told me I was lucky to be alive because when copper levels are dangerously high, women have been known to kill themselves and/or their babies. I cried, remembering how unrecognizable I was when I imploded. Once on prescribed targeted nutrients, avoiding high copper foods, and getting off the hormone replacement drugs, my depression and anxiety gradually disappeared, but I still felt fatigue.

Although there is a known correlation between estrogen and copper, mainstream doctors don’t test copper levels or estrogen-dominance, so the doctor who prescribed birth control pills and the doctor who prescribed Prozac were unaware of how those drugs interacted with my dysfunctional system, which was a recipe for disaster. There was nothing wrong with my brain. I had a simple biochemical imbalance that was misdiagnosed as mental illness.

After surviving copper toxicity, I researched the topic, gathered my journal notes, and authored a book about my journey to provide hope to other women who may be suffering unnecessarily. Sharing my story led to many kind notes from readers who could resonate with my experience.

I was grateful for the doctors who identified copper toxicity as the primary root cause of my depression and high anxiety. With the heavy metal out of my body, and the other nutrients that had been out of balance because of the high copper now back in balance, I could think clearly.

I felt in my heart that something had caused my body to express a copper dysfunction. The presumed attempted suicide and the self-harm were so uncharacteristic of me. With the help of a cognitive behavioral therapist, I was able to bring to light how both actions were desperate cries for help, attempting to create a sense of control over the overwhelming, uncontrollable emotional pain. But what was the source of the emotional pain?

The answer was in the research I did on copper toxicity. Stress increases estrogen and can cause copper to rise and be retained in the body. Being that I was already estrogen-dominant, the immense environmental stress I was under put me in a constant fight or flight state.

My attempts at stress-reducing techniques like meditation and breathing exercises helped, but I still had an underlying unhappiness. I was afraid of going back into depression, so I worked hard on self-trust with my therapist to overcome my fears and take my power back by leaving my energy-draining marriage, which was a prime source of my fatigue and unhappiness.

Once on my own, the real healing started. As I looked back on the self-serving disrespect in my marriage, I realized I had become accustomed to giving my energy away and managing others’ emotions. The emotional abuse was subtle and manipulative.

As women, we often care for others without regard for our own well-being. The emotional abuse I endured, disguised as love, hurt because the person I thought loved me took advantage of my vulnerabilities. The loss of my second pregnancy was out of my control because I was let down by the medical community and my husband.

Our bodies are comprised of water, protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals that fuel, repair, regulate, and enable every system to function. So the first line of treatment should have been to test for imbalances. However, mainstream doctors, not trained in nutritional supplementation, prescribe harmful pharmaceuticals to patients without testing. They rely on the sometimes delusional patient to tell them how they feel, then prescribe a one-size-fits-all drug, even though we all have unique biochemistries.

The lesson from my healing journey is that things are not always as they appear. I have been free from mental health pharmaceuticals for almost two decades and symptom-free for over a decade, most notably since receiving proper treatment, leaving a toxic environment, and setting boundaries. I finally realized it is better to be alone than to be with someone who made me feel alone.