by Jimi Hunt
The next morning I was at work, sitting at my desk across from my father, who was in helping me with some accounts. I had been doing some research on this ‘Dr McEwan’. Was he really a doctor? Did he even know what he was talking about? OMG. He had the worst website on the planet. It looked as if it had been made by an autistic 12-year-old in the early 1990s. I couldn’t go and see a man with a website like that. Seriously. I won’t go into cafes that use Papyrus font because it offends the design gods.
I read on. He charged $300 per hour for business-related sessions? Well, I wouldn’t be putting it on my business card then! But it was only $200 an hour for personal sessions . . . that’s a bargain? I also found out he had done a lot of work for the Catholic Church, which is, in my opinion, the most fundamentally evil organisation to ever inhabit this planet. I have a large problem with organised religion. If you want to believe in something bigger than yourself, by all means go ahead. Who am I to stop you? No one. But, for me, this was the final straw. I would not go and see this man. Two hours before my appointment, I called and cancelled it. I was irate and I told Dad what I’d done.
Dad is one of the calmest and smartest men on the planet. He slowly turned and said to me, ‘Jimi, I don’t care if this man is the Pope, an Eskimo or a damn alien from another planet, if he has the answers then that’s all you need him for. Go and see him, get the answers, leave and never go back.’
Okay . . . okay. You’re right. I will go just this once to see if he has the answers. But as I always have to have the last word, I said, ‘If he doesn’t fix me in one session I’m not going to continue to go back week after week at $200 an hour and waste your money.’
‘Okay,’ said Dad, ‘but go today.’
I drove to Greenlane, where Dr John McEwan works out of the front room of his house. It was sunny outside and the room was warm and inviting. I sank into the comfortable couch as the doctor poured me a glass of water. The room was quite cluttered, almost fussy. The walls were lined with books and knick-knacks. Dr John looked like a professor. He had a white beard and his clothes—slacks, shirt and tie—weren’t offensive but they weren’t exactly on trend either. He looked as if he worked with the church, I thought to myself.
‘So, Jimi, what can I help you with?’ he asked.
This time I was determined not to muck around. With the other doctors I had wasted the entire first session telling stories about what was wrong with me, and I didn’t want to do that again. Just before I had left my office I had made a one-page document entitled ‘Stuff That Is Wrong With Me’. It was one side of an A4 sheet and listed, in bullet-point form, the exact things that I thought were wrong with me.
I handed him the list.
Stuff That Is Wrong With Me:
• I think I have been suffering symptoms for about 18 or so months now.
• Started with a random inability to open emails. Anxiety.
• I have an inability to focus. I find it really hard to do work. Especially recently.
• I don’t have over- or under-eating issues, but I cannot for the life of me decide what I want to eat. Food just doesn’t appeal. Except Indian. I can always eat Indian.
• I feel really really lonely. I can’t spend a night at home alone.
• I sometimes catch myself talking to myself. Just general conversations. I’m quite engaging . . .
• I cry. A lot. Not for no reason. But for reasons that I would have never cried about before.
• I feel helpless. And hopeless. And occasionally I have felt like giving up. Not on life, but on work, marriage and anything else I can think of.
• I worry about money. All the time. I worry about how much this is costing me right now. Jo hasn’t made much money in the last two years. I resent her for that. I can’t have and do the things that I want because I have to pay for her.
• It’s a marriage, and I accept that, I love her, I want to be able to buy her things and pay for her. But right now, I resent that.
• I feel heavy. Most of the time. It’s just a strange and all over weight.
• My wife is amazing. But she has had enough and can’t take me anymore. I snap at her. I don’t even realise that I do it. I feel like she is picking on me all the time. I am retaliatory. Which means that this never ends well.
• She annoys me. A lot. She never has before. I can’t even sit down and talk to her anymore. All of this means that we argue. A lot. And our marriage is disintegrating.
He gave a wry smirk as he read the title. I’m sure no one had ever turned up to his office with a complete list of the things that he needed to fix for them. Of course they hadn’t. I always have to be different. He read through the list to himself, but each time he got to a new point he said to himself, but quite loudly, ‘Mid-brain.’ ‘Mid-brain, mid-brain, midbrain, mid-brain’, all the way down the list.
Strange, I thought. It feels slightly awkward sitting on a couch having a man you don’t know read a list of all of your problems. I still didn’t trust him. He looked weird. Was it his shifty eyes?
He looked up after finishing reading the list and said, ‘So, are you a creative?’ Jo must have told him on the phone. He must have googled my name before I got there.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I own a branding and design company.’ I handed him a pink plastic disc—my circular business card—because I am quite proud of it. ‘How did you know that?’ I asked, quite intrigued to find out whether he was a good researcher or simply psychic.
‘All of these problems that you have here happen in the mid-brain,’ he said. ‘That is the creative part of the brain. So we treat people like you differently from people like John Kirwan and other sports-type people.’
Really? I thought. Wow. That actually makes a hell of a lot of sense. Of course our brains are different, they work differently and we think differently. Why should we be treated the same? That really is just logical. He was the first doctor to actually make any sense to me. Ol’ Doctor Church-face had me hooked. I was ready to listen to what he had to say. Maybe, just maybe, this man had some answers for me. He was sure as hell off to a better start than all the others.
‘We’re not going to call what you have depression,’ he said. ‘We are going to call it overload.’
DR JOHN’S PRESCRIPTION
John doesn’t like the term mental illness. He thinks it does more harm than good. He doesn’t follow the diagnostic statistical manual that American psychologists and, now, most of the rest of the world follow. He believes more in the works of a group of psychologists from the fifties and sixties, especially Orval Hobart Mowrer, who wrote a book called Morality and Mental Health with a specific chapter called ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’. They came from an empowerment angle rather than a medical model. That should work for me!
Dr John started asking questions. I told him about all the stress and pressure that I had been under. I said that it was okay now. But really, meeting three big life-changing deadlines hadn’t really helped anything.
I told him about Lilo The Waikato and how I was working out all the time and getting fitter, as well as eating better. I explained that these things hadn’t really helped me. I told him about the relentless crying and I started crying right there, in front of him, for no reason. I told him about fighting with Jo and a minute later not being able to remember what we’d been fighting about.
He explained to me that that is part of what the term ‘overload’ means. My brain simply couldn’t cope with the extra stimulus in its current state so when something like a fight happens, it’s not that I had forgotten what we were fighting about, it was actually that my brain had become so overloaded that I never actually formed those memories in the first place. I asked him if that’s why I had a generally poor recollection of the last couple of years and he agreed that was a likely explanation.
He asked me when was the last time I went to the doctor.
‘February,’ I said.
‘What for?’
‘Well, in Jan
uary I was up in India. I go up to India for business a bit, and even though I am immunised for everything under the sun, I got sick. I went to the doctor when I got back. They did some tests but by the time the tests came back I was back to normal and feeling fine. Turns out that I had contracted hepatitis E.’
Yip, there’s practically an alphabet of hepatitises and I had hepatitis E, but it’s supposed to be the best hepatitis to get—the others can stay with you forever, but this one only stays with you for about nine months. Faecal contamination of water or food is the most likely source. How did I get shit in my mouth? My best guess was the time my hosts in Mumbai had taken me out to eat some street food. Damn.
Moving on, Dr John asked if I made a habit of eating breakfast. ‘No, not really.’
Did I drink much water? ‘No. Not really.’ I’m sure there were other questions but those are the two I remember. He stopped, looked at me and paused. I was sick of the questions. That’s all psychologists seem to do, ask questions.
After quite a long pause he said the one line that I will remember forever, the one line that set me free, the one line that changed my life. ‘Jimi, you don’t have a mental problem. You have a chemical one.’
I didn’t really know what that meant, but I knew that he had told me that I wasn’t mental. Until then I had thought I was mental. The behaviours that I was exhibiting told me that I was mental. Crying because I couldn’t figure out what I wanted for lunch? That’s goddamn mental in my book.
But now, according to this bearded gentleman, I wasn’t mental. Yes! Yes! Yes! I feel lighter. I feel happier. I feel great. But hold on a minute, he hasn’t actually solved any of my problems. He’s just told me I’m not mental. In fact, he’s added a problem to my list. I now have a ‘chemical problem’, but what the hell does that mean? I don’t do drugs. Hold on, he’s going to give me drugs. Drugs fix chemical problems, don’t they? I will not be taking any goddamn drugs.
‘So, a chemical problem . . . Does that mean I need to take drugs?’
‘No,’ said John. ‘We can fix this pretty simply without drugs.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I just wish you had come to see me earlier so I could have saved you and Jo all this pain.’
Wow. I’m speechless. He sounds as if he’s got a solution for me and he seems pretty confident about it.
‘Your chemical problem is actually quite common. Most people with depression have this problem. You have a chemical imbalance in which you have too much cortisol, which is the body’s stress hormone. And not enough serotonin, which is the body’s “happy” chemical.’
That sounded logical, but how could I fix it?
‘Well, we’ll start with the cortisol. It’s produced by the adrenal glands, and overproduction is caused by stress on the body. Prolonged cortisol secretion results in significant physiological changes.’
Okay . . .
‘Simply, cortisol isn’t a good thing to have a lot of in your body, and there are only two ways that it exits the body—crying . . .’
At which point I interrupted. ‘Well, I do a hell of a lot of that!’ I said.
‘. . . or peeing. How much water do you drink in a day?’ he asked.
‘Umm, let me work that out. A glass is 355 ml, plus bottles are 700 ml, per week, divided by seven, equals . . . none. I don’t actually drink any water. I drink a lot of Coke. A lot of Coke. Oh, and milkshakes, the occasional orange juice, but no. No water.’
‘Right,’ said Dr John. ‘Well, you now have a new motto. Your new motto is, “Pee your way through the day”.’ He recited this with pleasure and an upbeat cadence. He was quite proud of it. ‘You need to drink at least two litres of water per day. That way, you’ll go to the toilet four to five times a day, and you’ll pee out all of your cortisol.’
Interesting. And it doesn’t sound that hard to do. I’m sure I can achieve that.
Then he stood up. I had no idea what was coming next. ‘When you’ve finished peeing, I want you to do a haka.’
A haka? Why on earth would I need to do a Maori war dance? He proceeded to perform a white man’s haka that would make the 1924 Invincibles cringe, with some wide yawning jaw movements thrown in for good measure. At that moment I really thought I was mental, but I thought Dr John was mental, too.
He explained to me that there is some actual science—chemistry, in fact—to this madness of his. He gave me a lesson about cortisol. Cortisol can build up inside people, especially people with sedentary jobs. It’s hard-wired into us all. In the beginning, we were hunters and the only time our bodies were still and our minds active was when we were stalking prey. Our bodies know this and in those conditions—still body and active mind—they produce cortisol. It causes what we often call the ‘fight or flight response’. Cortisol does some useful things, like reducing inflammation, and it causes fluid retention, cutting down on trips to the toilet. It also increases blood pressure. These are all good things if you’re trying to stalk and kill a woolly mammoth. But these days my woolly mammoth meat comes vacuum packed from the local supermarket. My job consists of sitting at a desk drawing pretty pictures and writing. So my body was producing too much cortisol and that’s not a good thing.
Dr John continued to explain what he wanted me to do. After peeing, which was going to be more frequent than before because of all the water I was going to be drinking, he wanted me to do some squat stretches. This meant I was to stretch my arms up above my head, rotate my shoulders, yawn and stretch out my jaw, do a couple of squats and basically loosen up.
It’s not something to do at a public urinal. I hoped I’d always have a cubicle available. The exercise is mimicking the hunter’s experience catching his prey. It’s you telling your body, ‘I’m up, I’m loose, I’m free and I don’t need you to produce any more cortisol.’ That was it. That’s the cortisol side of the imbalance. A simple two-part prescription—drink water and stretch. I could do that.
Next up, he dealt to the serotonin. ‘The hepatitis E is actually a contributing factor to your depression,’ he said. ‘Hep E, like all forms of hepatitis, is a liver disease that affects the production and regulation of serotonin in your liver, as well as other things.’
‘Okay. But what does that matter?’
‘So, you don’t eat any breakfast?’
‘Nope. I get up, go to work and eat lunch at 12 pm. But that’s actually when I get hungry.’
If you’re like me, when you were growing up, your mother told you that you should drink more water and that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. We all respect our mums but do we always listen? Not really. It’s just one of those things that she says. Sure sure, water and breakfast. Mums have told that same tired story for decades and largely been ignored, because it’s just your mum again. If a guy with a bunch of degrees on the wall says the same thing you take more notice, because he’s studied for years, so he must be smart.
‘Breakfast is key,’ said Dr John. ‘You need to get up, have a drink—water, orange juice, milk, whatever—to get the stomach going, get it working. Then you need to have a protein breakfast. Basically, what you’re doing is giving your brain the primal message that you’re stocked up and ready for the day. The brain then says, “Great, it’s time to go and do things, I’d better get the body to start making chemicals.” So the liver goes into production and starts making the chemicals because you’ve given it the message that we’ve got fuel on board, we’re ready to go.’
Ahhh, and because I had hepatitis E, which was inhibiting my liver, my chemical production wasn’t working as well as it should. But it was a little more specific than that. The liver uses protein to make serotonin. The liver also does the majority of its serotonin production between the hours of 3 am and 3 pm. By skipping breakfast and waiting until lunchtime to eat, my liver had only a very short time to produce the chemical that would make me happy.
John explained it to me like this. ‘If you have a car with no fuel you can push it around and it i
s still kind of useful, but it’s only when it has the right fuel in it that you can burn rubber.’
He prescribed 30 grams of protein to be eaten as soon as I got up each morning, in order to fuel my liver so that it could produce the maximum amount of serotonin possible.
Again, his simple scientific explanation made sense to me. I needed to drink water and eat meat for breakfast. An egg has about six grams of protein in it, but I couldn’t possibly eat five eggs a day. I was going to have to have a protein shake, eat some chicken, beef, pork, lamb, fish or yoghurt, or drink lots of milk to get 30 grams of protein onboard before I went to work. Great. I could do those things. Was that all I needed to do?
‘There is also the “Yahoo Factor’’,’ said John, and he bellowed out a hearty ‘Yaahooo!’
I thought to myself, ‘This man is a weirdo.’ He explained that I needed to get the Yahoo Factor back into my life, by celebrating my successes. He wanted me to celebrate every time I came up with a good idea, every time I finished a great drawing and every time I did something cool. Celebrate by yelling yahoo? I worked in an office, I had staff, I would not be yelling yahoo every time I did something cool.
‘Why will this help me? Will this actually do any good at all?’ I asked.
‘Yelling yahoo actually pumps you up. Think about it. Your mid-brain, it doesn’t read words, it only reads feelings and body tension. If you are celebrating something, if you are stimulating the nerve endings, it goes straight into the brain with the message, “Wow, we’re feeling good.” It’s actually producing chemicals in the brain that make you feel better.’
My mind went straight to the saying ‘Fake it till you make it’. I am always interested in where sayings come from. For instance, I am a freelance designer and in the Middle Ages freelancers were soldiers who fought for anyone who would hire them. They were literally free lances. I looked up ‘Fake it till you make it’ online. This is what Wikipedia said:
