Thinking Holistically About Herbs for Mental Health

by Erico

Herbs for mental health is a huge topic. I’m not going to go into too much depth right now because this is just a single post. However, I want to share a little perspective on how I think about it holistically.

For people who don’t work in health care, the terms like sadness, sorrow, grief, the blues, gloom, melancholy and depression can often be used interchangeably. But in a health care setting, there is a distinction between gloom and sorrow, which are feelings, and Depression (with a capital D), which is a diagnosis. When someone comes in to a health care visit and says “I’m feeling a lot of depression,” we typically need to seek clarity: are you already diagnosed with clinical Depression? Or are you describing feelings (sad/sorrowful/gloomy/etc..)?

In clinical mental health care, the distinction that raises sadness to the level of clinical Depression is a matter of meeting certain thresholds: how severe is it? How long does it last? How much does it interfere with daily life? If enough of the criteria are met, then the feeling the person is having might meet the definition of clinical Depression. 

But for the person feeling it, the distinctions can seem a little arbitrary and they may not be able to tell the difference in the moment. “Feeling depressed” seems like a normal thing to say and it is certainly a recognizable experience. 

Now, here comes the interesting part: from the perspective of an herbalist, we have to be very clear that we are not using herbs to treat diagnosed diseases. Saying to a client “I want to give you this herb for your Depression” can land you in trouble if you are not licensed to diagnose or treat mental illness. However, saying “this herb has helped a lot of people when they are feeling a sense of gloom or melancholy” is not is simply a reference to a common and familiar shared human experience. 

I don’t talk about herbs "treating Depression" or "treating Anxiety." I do talk about herbs helping us humans when we are in states of sorrow or anxiousness. This isn’t just to use semantics to stay out of trouble. It is because these feelings are part of the universal human experience. Anyone can feel down, and anyone feeling down might experience an uplift from some Lemon Balm, Lavender, Albizia flowers, Rosemary or Spikenard. The language around the herbs is itself part of healing… by de-stigmatizing our feelings and by removing isolating labels. 

This is not to say that clinical Depression doesn’t exist. On the basis of the clinical criteria, some people fit the definition. And a mental health professional can determine if they meet the criteria. (And, I should add, learning that one’s experiences match a diagnostic label can be very helpful for some.) But sadness and grief are feelings every person can have, and knowing we are not alone in our feelings helps transform one persons grief into a shared reality everyone in the metaphorical village can address. For lonely or isolated people, learning that we experience something in common is healing. All over the world there are cultural practices for the sharing of grief. Plant medicines fit very nicely into shared human experiences… everyone can drink this tea together, everyone who might be feeling this way can touch this plant, smell these flowers, dig these roots. When I share an herb with someone who is feeling down, I am also inviting them to participate in long held traditions of using sensory and energetic experiences to affect mood, often in a community context.

While it’s true that some plants have proven themselves to have anti-depressant or anxiolytic effects in human clinical trials, I see that as basically just information to convince skeptics. It’s not the same thing as experiencing a direct change in one's own mood from interacting with a plant. Some herbs that officially “work for this” don’t work for a particular person. And some herbs that “haven’t been proven" to work are found by one individual to be very effective. Moods like sadness are feelings and experiences, and plant interactions affect those experiences. Thus I do not use herbs to address “this or that mental health diagnosis.” Instead, I work with herbs to address our mental and emotional health, the sorrow and grief we may, at times, all have felt.

(no AI of any sort was used in writing this post. And that makes me feel good.)