Chemical Sensitivity Tied to Anxiety, Depression ?
Q.Anxiety and depression may be important features of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), a controversial diagnosis given to some people with apparent allergic reactions to a range of everyday exposures.
A.According Caccappolo-van Vliet and her colleagues, if a person associates symptoms with a certain environmental trigger, "fear and anxiety would also be expected to accompany such exposures and contribute to symptoms." They note that for asthmatics, this idea is "generally accepted as reasonable" since environmental irritants are known to trigger asthma attacks. "However," the researchers add, "for MCS patients this response tends to be attributed more to psychiatric causes, perhaps a result of the lack of an identified organic basis to the illness." But whatever the cause of MCS symptoms, they conclude, the current findings suggest that if the anxiety and depression that come with MCS are treated, patients' physical and mental symptoms might improve. We went out of the apartment for a while, and when she walked in the door, she looked at me with wild eyes and said "Don't you feel those fleas?" I was pretty concerned about her, muscle tested her for the flea powder (extremely weak), opened the windows, had her spend the night at my house, cleared her (with NAET) of the flea powder. She was nauseated in the middle of the night from that treatment. Anyway, the story has a happy ending because she stopped using the flea powder and is fine. But with her symptoms, had she seen a doctor in her condition, any doctor would have prescribed an SSRI. I assume that by 'susceptible people' you are also considering people that have a pre-diosposition to be affected by hearing about a problem, and then developing symptoms related to that problem. I like to call it the Marcus Welby Syndrome. While there may be a physiological basis for some of the complaints, I believe that the problems are more psychological than physiological.
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