How Addressing Nutrition Makes Talk Therapy More Effective

Leslie Korn spent 10 years living among indigenous people in the jungles of Mexico, and that experience honed her awareness of the link between nutrition, physiology, and the sense of well-being that we call optimal mental health. It informs her writing and pioneering work using nutrition and natural medicine in the treatment of mental health, cognitive function, chronic illness, and pain.

Since psychotherapists are not routinely trained to factor in the role of nutrition, Leslie’s focus on why and how to incorporate nutritional interventions is especially important and useful right now. This is how Leslie explains it:

The primary principle to understand is this: Where there is mental imbalance or mental illness, there is always digestive illness. Our mental health is predicated not only on our experiences in the external world, but on our internal landscape. And that internal landscape is biochemical. So whether we’re working with someone who is simply extremely stressed or someone dealing with chronic depression, anxiety, panic, or PTSD, there are always biochemical and physiological components. Those components are always affected by nutrition.

In this clip from our current webcast series on integrating mind-body techniques in talk therapy, Leslie illustrates how the body’s response to chronic stress can feed depression, and she lays the groundwork for including the biological and physiological systems as part of effective treatment.

I hope you can join us for my conversation with Leslie Korn this coming Wednesday. She offers therapists a new way of understanding the mind-body connection and presents a wide range of nutritional interventions–many of them very simple–that are critical to achieving and maintaining optimal mental and emotional health.

Integrative Mental Health
How Mind-Body Techniques Are Changing Talk Therapy
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