Here is the story about how kratom has changed my life, for the better #iamkratom
This is a special story I am going to share with you today. It is about how a plant that is native to Indonesia has revolutionized how I take care of my mental health. The plant is called kratom. Farmers in southeast Asia harvest the leaves from kratom trees and grind them into a very fine powder. You can read a lot about kratom and it's history, and it's healthful benefits on the internet. A lot of people use kratom for a variety of types of health benefits.
My mental health problems have been going on for nearly two decades now. I was diagnosed as being bipolar when I was 40 years old. I had a very severe mental breakdown from severe mood swings that had been going on for about a year. Thankfully, hospitalization was not required, but I was put onto a large variety of anti-depressants and mood stabilizers. Eventually, my diagnosis was changed stating that I was suffering from schizo-affective disorder and anti-psychotic medications were thrown into my pharmaceutical cocktail. Five years slipped by and I also developed agoraphobia. I put on fifty pounds and lived life as a veritable zombie. All of my former ambitions that I had in life had evaporated. (When I had my breakdown I was enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was finishing up a degree in anthropology. My dream was to go to graduate school to study Library Science so that I could become a research librarian).
After that first five years on psych meds, I started to have a bit of an awakening and I decided that if I wanted to get better, I was going to have to decide to make some changes on my own. My psychiatrists were happy with me being a non-functional human that willingly obeyed their instructions to continue eating the pills they were convinced was making my life better. I got a different idea. I decided to see what would happen if I stopped taking my medications. And I wasn't going to tell my doctors. I went for an entire year without taking mood stabilizers or antidepressants and got feeling back in my heart and body. And I did not turn into an out of control manic maniac. I did have mood swings again, but it was like I learned how to behave better during that down time. I had learned how to modify my behavior through conscious living.
At the end of that year, I confessed to my general practitioner what I had done. He was curious about how I had lost weight and why I was feeling better. This is where the story shines a dark shadow upon the medical community. My general practitioner threatened to stop treating me if I did not go back on medications. He said that he would not take responsibility for my care if I were to have another breakdown. I should have just found a new doctor, which I would finally end up doing a few years later, but I bent to his threats and went back on meds. Thankfully, not as many as I had been on when I was first diagnosed, but just enough to make my doctors happy.
Fast forward to 2013, fifteen years after my breakdown, one of my oldest friends told me about this wonderful, natural remedy that they had discovered called kratom. I read as much about the plant as I could and decided that I had to try it. My first purchase of kratom was a bag of 60 Red Bali capsules. (Again, if you read about kratom on the internet you can learn that there are what they call different strains of the plant. The different strains serve to remedy different types of ailments that people suffer from.) This was my first experience of using any type of natural remedy to treat my depression, and within a couple of weeks of taking these capsules I started to feel different.
I began to have physical energy that I was not used to feeling. And I also found that I had this sly grin that would creep up on my face. I was actually feeling happy. Oh, and as soon as I started to feel this small, subtle changes I decided to stop using the psych meds again. I ordered more kratom, some different colored strains, and then things really began to change. One of the side effects from the psych meds that I had been addicted to was sensitivity to sunlight. For a decade I had been unable to spend time outdoors during the daytime. I was shocked to watch that sensitivity diminish, and with the energy and good feelings I was having from the kratom I became able to go out for walks during the day.
Here is one of my most favorite memorable experiences. The agoraphobia I had suffered from made me believe a lot of reasons that convinced me I could not do certain things. One of these fears was that I was not healthy enough to walk to the library in my city, which was a mere two miles away. About a month into using kratom, I woke up one morning and said to myself (and my mom), "I'm going to walk to the library today!" Mom reiterated my long established fears about why I believed that I could not do that. I assured her that I was feeling very different and that I believed I was capable of doing it. I had some books that needed to be returned so I put them into my knapsack, along with a bottle of water, and headed out. It was like my eyes had opened upon a brand new world. The more I walked that day, the more energy I had. There was none of the old fear of it being too far, or too dangerous to walk on my city's streets. As well, the dread of being outdoors during the day was gone. The sunlight was not painful to endure any longer. That totally blew my mind.
I began going out for walks every single day. And I started walking further. I even went for walks on days when the temperature was in the mid to upper 90s! Freaking mindblowing. And continually mindblowing was the fact that I was no longer suffering from depression. I started to eat better, I was losing weight, I was probably the healthiest that I had been in my entire life.
Something I didn't mention yet, but is pretty obvious when you hear it is that since the time of my major mental breakdown, I was unemployed. I had been told by my doctors that I would probably never be able to work again. Well, a year into using kratom I felt good enough to believe that I was capable of getting a job. I had one place in mind for my first attempt at re-entering the workforce, a small mom and pop produce market in town. I felt that since I had worked for them when I was a teenager, they would remember me and not judge me for not having any current work history. And it happened! They hired me on the spot and I fell right back into the groove of having a job to go to everyday. I worked for them for three months until I became even more brave and decided to apply for a job at one of the chain grocery stores in town. I applied for a job at Whole Foods, and was hired!
I tell you this story in complete honesty, that if it were not for this gentle, beautiful, natural remedy, kratom, I would not be the happy and healthy and more functional
member of society that I have become. Psychological medications only perpetuated my condition. The side affects brought on by antidepressants and mood stabilizers debilitated my mentally and physically and did not make me better in any sense of the word.
I am sharing this story with you now because of the threat that the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is making of banning this plants availability in this country so that people like myself will not be allowed to purchase and use this plant. Literally millions of people that suffer from depression and other ailments that kratom benefits (pain relief and being able to detox from opiate addiction are the other main benefits that people claim) are going to be cut off from this simple, and abundant remedy. I am declaring with this testimony that, I AM KRATOM and I feel that my life will radically change for the worse I am not able to continue using it. #iamkratom
My mental health problems have been going on for nearly two decades now. I was diagnosed as being bipolar when I was 40 years old. I had a very severe mental breakdown from severe mood swings that had been going on for about a year. Thankfully, hospitalization was not required, but I was put onto a large variety of anti-depressants and mood stabilizers. Eventually, my diagnosis was changed stating that I was suffering from schizo-affective disorder and anti-psychotic medications were thrown into my pharmaceutical cocktail. Five years slipped by and I also developed agoraphobia. I put on fifty pounds and lived life as a veritable zombie. All of my former ambitions that I had in life had evaporated. (When I had my breakdown I was enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was finishing up a degree in anthropology. My dream was to go to graduate school to study Library Science so that I could become a research librarian).
After that first five years on psych meds, I started to have a bit of an awakening and I decided that if I wanted to get better, I was going to have to decide to make some changes on my own. My psychiatrists were happy with me being a non-functional human that willingly obeyed their instructions to continue eating the pills they were convinced was making my life better. I got a different idea. I decided to see what would happen if I stopped taking my medications. And I wasn't going to tell my doctors. I went for an entire year without taking mood stabilizers or antidepressants and got feeling back in my heart and body. And I did not turn into an out of control manic maniac. I did have mood swings again, but it was like I learned how to behave better during that down time. I had learned how to modify my behavior through conscious living.
At the end of that year, I confessed to my general practitioner what I had done. He was curious about how I had lost weight and why I was feeling better. This is where the story shines a dark shadow upon the medical community. My general practitioner threatened to stop treating me if I did not go back on medications. He said that he would not take responsibility for my care if I were to have another breakdown. I should have just found a new doctor, which I would finally end up doing a few years later, but I bent to his threats and went back on meds. Thankfully, not as many as I had been on when I was first diagnosed, but just enough to make my doctors happy.
Fast forward to 2013, fifteen years after my breakdown, one of my oldest friends told me about this wonderful, natural remedy that they had discovered called kratom. I read as much about the plant as I could and decided that I had to try it. My first purchase of kratom was a bag of 60 Red Bali capsules. (Again, if you read about kratom on the internet you can learn that there are what they call different strains of the plant. The different strains serve to remedy different types of ailments that people suffer from.) This was my first experience of using any type of natural remedy to treat my depression, and within a couple of weeks of taking these capsules I started to feel different.
I began to have physical energy that I was not used to feeling. And I also found that I had this sly grin that would creep up on my face. I was actually feeling happy. Oh, and as soon as I started to feel this small, subtle changes I decided to stop using the psych meds again. I ordered more kratom, some different colored strains, and then things really began to change. One of the side effects from the psych meds that I had been addicted to was sensitivity to sunlight. For a decade I had been unable to spend time outdoors during the daytime. I was shocked to watch that sensitivity diminish, and with the energy and good feelings I was having from the kratom I became able to go out for walks during the day.
Here is one of my most favorite memorable experiences. The agoraphobia I had suffered from made me believe a lot of reasons that convinced me I could not do certain things. One of these fears was that I was not healthy enough to walk to the library in my city, which was a mere two miles away. About a month into using kratom, I woke up one morning and said to myself (and my mom), "I'm going to walk to the library today!" Mom reiterated my long established fears about why I believed that I could not do that. I assured her that I was feeling very different and that I believed I was capable of doing it. I had some books that needed to be returned so I put them into my knapsack, along with a bottle of water, and headed out. It was like my eyes had opened upon a brand new world. The more I walked that day, the more energy I had. There was none of the old fear of it being too far, or too dangerous to walk on my city's streets. As well, the dread of being outdoors during the day was gone. The sunlight was not painful to endure any longer. That totally blew my mind.
I began going out for walks every single day. And I started walking further. I even went for walks on days when the temperature was in the mid to upper 90s! Freaking mindblowing. And continually mindblowing was the fact that I was no longer suffering from depression. I started to eat better, I was losing weight, I was probably the healthiest that I had been in my entire life.
Something I didn't mention yet, but is pretty obvious when you hear it is that since the time of my major mental breakdown, I was unemployed. I had been told by my doctors that I would probably never be able to work again. Well, a year into using kratom I felt good enough to believe that I was capable of getting a job. I had one place in mind for my first attempt at re-entering the workforce, a small mom and pop produce market in town. I felt that since I had worked for them when I was a teenager, they would remember me and not judge me for not having any current work history. And it happened! They hired me on the spot and I fell right back into the groove of having a job to go to everyday. I worked for them for three months until I became even more brave and decided to apply for a job at one of the chain grocery stores in town. I applied for a job at Whole Foods, and was hired!
I tell you this story in complete honesty, that if it were not for this gentle, beautiful, natural remedy, kratom, I would not be the happy and healthy and more functional
member of society that I have become. Psychological medications only perpetuated my condition. The side affects brought on by antidepressants and mood stabilizers debilitated my mentally and physically and did not make me better in any sense of the word.
I am sharing this story with you now because of the threat that the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is making of banning this plants availability in this country so that people like myself will not be allowed to purchase and use this plant. Literally millions of people that suffer from depression and other ailments that kratom benefits (pain relief and being able to detox from opiate addiction are the other main benefits that people claim) are going to be cut off from this simple, and abundant remedy. I am declaring with this testimony that, I AM KRATOM and I feel that my life will radically change for the worse I am not able to continue using it. #iamkratom
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