Dan Stradford, Safe Harbor President, is interviewed by host of the Anxiety Summit, Trudy Scott, Food Mood Expert and Nutritionist, author of The Antianxiety Food Solution.
My Anxiety Story and the Message of Hope We Offer
- Safe Harbor /Alternative Mental Health: a message of hope and practitioner resources
- His low zinc, histadelia and anxiety
- Margot Kidder’s story with amino acids and bipolar disorder
- Success with social anxiety/pyroluria
- His greatest piece of wisdom from an elderly African priest
Safe Harbor is the world’s largest site on non-drug approaches for mental health.
Thousands of people around the world have recovered from mental disorders and now enjoy the simple pleasures of a drug-free life. Most were told this was impossible. Yet we hear from these individuals regularly. Many others have been able to significantly reduce their dependency on psychiatric medication. Commonly these people find that underlying their “mental” disorders are medical problems, allergies, toxic conditions, nutritional imbalances, poor diets, lack of exercise, or other treatable physical conditions.
Safe Harbor is a nonprofit corporation, founded in 1998 and based in Los Angeles, California.
In 1958, when Safe Harbor founder Dan Stradford was four years old, his father, William Stradford, vanished into a mental hospital with a “nervous breakdown.” After receiving a series of shock treatments and potent drugs, William Stradford returned home a broken man. His memory was gone, his personality had deteriorated, and he could scarcely hold a job.
William Stradford – a once-vibrant, personable man – never recovered. The family, with 4 children, plummeted into poverty and fell apart. All the children except for Dan ended up in children’s homes.
From a very early age, Dan Stradford felt there had to be safer, more effective alternatives for treating the mentally disturbed. In 1998 he formed the groundwork for the Safe Harbor Project to help others avoid the tragedy he witnessed growing up.
Finding many like-minded people inside and outside the medical community, Dan requested their help as board members and advisors and the Safe Harbor Project was born.
Safe Harbor has a very active Integrative Psychiatry email listserv for professionals who wish to share information on alternative mental health treatments. You can find out more about this and sign up here
This is the ebook for health professionals: Complementary and Alternative Medicine Treatments in Psychiatry
There is a practitioner directory but I’m not sure how accurate it is right now. They just moved to a new website format and I don’t see my listing there. We’ll keep you posted as it gets fixed.
Here is a link to Margot Kidder’s story: The Role of Amino Acids in Bipolar Disorder and Mental Health
The big takeaways from this interview:
- The human mind and body is very complex and many overlapping factors can contribute to your anxiety
- The physical aspect is the most unknown cause of mental health and most practitioners don’t know about this aspect
If you are not already registered for the Anxiety Summit you can get live access to the speakers of the day here: www.theAnxietySummit.com
Missed this interview or can’t listen live? Or want this and the other great interviews for your learning library? Purchase the MP3s or MP3s + transcripts and listen when it suits you.
You can find your purchasing options here: Anxiety Summit Season 1, Anxiety Summit Season 2, and Anxiety Summit Season 3.
Thank you Trudy – beautiful, helpful interview; What a lovely man Dan Stradford is – all of your speakers were amazing. I am just looking for the histamine questionnaire. Thank you – have enjoyed this 3rd summit of yours greatly. Thank you.
Thanks Melanie – I agree, Dan Stradford is a lovely man!
And yes all my speakers are quite something
I don’t yet have it as a blog but have it on the list to add – just playing catch up here with all the interaction with all my lovely listeners and have gotten a little behind
Love to see you joining us again!
Trudy
Thank you so much for another fabulous summit. I have heard all the interviews from all three summits … an incredible wealth of wellness information.
I appreciated Mr. Stradford’s greatest piece of wisdom from an elderly African priest … that is very helpful to me, as I have my anxiety-ridden mother who will not accept this information from me, as well as friends who prefer to take anti-depressants rather than look into diet/lefestyle and amino acids. Very sad.
But, thank you so much, Trudy. You have helped me and many thousands of people so much.
Thanks Pam – I agree, such wisdom! We can just plant the seed and know they have to be ready. But I hear you about how hard it can be
Thanks for your kind words!
I am a psychiatrist and I felt very positively inspired by this interview. I have always felt there was something missing in traditional psychiatry and since past year, I have become interested in the role of nutrition and supplementing deficiencies in treatment of mental health. I work in one of the most famous hospitals in the UK and yet I havent found a single researcher in Institute of Psychiatry workign along these lines which bodes so badly for the future of psychiatry. I hope to increase my own knowledge first and then use education to spread awareness about this.
I felt very inspired by this talk
Hi there,
I am a nutritional therapist and was interested to know what dose of SAMe Dan used and which brand? It is quite a new one for me and I have never used it in my nutritional practice. What are your thoughts on it and what is its main role/ mechanism of action? I know it is big in the methylation cycle…
Thanks,
Susan
Hi Trudy,
Thanks for this very informative interview. Would Dan or you know of any functional psychiatrist in Canada??
God Bless
Thank you for this wonderful interview, Trudy and indeed, for the whole summit! It has been so, SO amazing!!!
I wonder if you could please help though as I was having a brain fog moment whilst listening to Dan’s interview. What was his high (was it high?) histamine levels indicative of exactly? And was this what he used the SAMe to treat it with? And was this high histamine issue what his other family members had too or was it something else? Dan’s story really struck a chord with me, especially his getting colds all the time which I (and my mother too) do and I’m convinced I have a histamine issue at play here…
And I’m so right there with you both that “mental illness” is NOT in our minds, it’s (deficiencies / imbalances) in our bodies! Thanks so so much and a BIG thank you hug from London, Tara
Dear dear Trudy,
Thank you so much for all this amazing information you are putting together and delivering to all of us who are on this search journey to heal and have more productive and healthy lives.
I have been learning so much with all your guests this season, and I so regret that I did not pay attention to your season 2 (which I registered for but for some reason or other did not pay much attention to !)
Dan Stradford interview today really really moved me, as it resonates so much with my particular situation and what I have been living with for 52 years now.
I know I can be happy and productive and a contributing member to society everyday (and not only when I’m “up” on my rare bursts of energy – there she is going crazy again , oh hang on it’s just for 3 or 4 days, she ll get back to herself soon as my family says).
Thank you both for all the work you have been doing, for educating people and for putting out all this information that otherwise people who are isolated and with no financial or other resources could get access to.
Please forgive me for my somewhat scrambled English and also for not publishing Thanks in Facebook or other social media as I don’t do Facebook and such.
All the best for you
Isabel – you are so welcome! so pleased Dan’s interview really resonated with you! I loved it too
Loved this talk!! Ty! I just recently took the whole blood histamine test. However, I am on 30 mg. of zinc at bedtime. And take p5p. Will this mess up my results??? Ty!
Trudy,
Even the sound of your lovely voice has a calming effect and I don’t even suffer from anxiety, among the things that do bother me!
The comment from the African priest was especially powerful as I am often disappointed that friends or family members stubbornly stick with their Rx even with side-effects and no improvements in health. It’s been troubling me for long enough that I had contracted the old adage to “horse-water”! I’m happy to delete that from my mind now.
Thank you for another great summit! Carry on in good, better yet, great health.
Gillian
Gillian
So glad my voice is calming! And yes I also love that wisdom from the African priest! Thanks!