Tea Time: Essential Oils Are Dangerous

Hi everybody, thanks for coming back. We are talking about something that's like, I don't know, I don't want to say controversial because it shouldn't be controversial, but I guess we might rope some people the wrong way today, so we will find out. But I mean, you already clicked on the video, you saw the title, you know what we're doing. We're talking about people on the internet and their like weird bullshit cures for like anxiety and depression and trauma and just like mental illness stuff in general. And so, yeah, let's talk about it. Okay, so before we get started, I want to issue like a quick disclaimer. This is not me shitting on people who use essential oils or take like supplements and like ---- like that. I don't give a **** what you do or what you put in your body or whatever. I take issue with this because people spread this information and present it in a way like it's an alternative to therapy or like it's a better or like cheaper alternative in going to therapy, which is, first of all, just like ******* not true, but second of all, it's really harmful to people and you can like really hurt people with this stuff. So that's why we're talking about it. I don't have any issue with people who use essential oils. I love essential oils. My ******* cabinet is filled with them. I actually have a diffuser in my office at work. I mean it like I'm sitting in front of a collection of rocks, so like clearly I'm like a little bit of a woo-woo type of person, but like I just, in my opinion, there's like a time and a place for stuff like that and therapy and talking about people's mental illness is not it. So yeah, let's talk about some stuff. Most of the stuff that I found came from Pinterest because Pinterest is just a ******* cesspool of garbage information. So let's talk about it. So the first one that I want to talk about is this little thing called Natural Remedies for Anxiety. And it has a little section in here, I'll like highlight it up here, that says key deficiencies. Magnesium, vitamin D, zinc, vitamin B6, vitamin B9 or folate, and vitamin B12. And I want to tread carefully here because I'm not a medical doctor. I don't know ---- all about how the human body works or anything like that, so I'm not trying to pretend like I ******* know how this works. But acting like if you have a vitamin D deficiency and that's why you have depression, that's an issue. When we say things like, oh, we have a deficiency in vitamin D and that's why you're depressed, I mean maybe, that might be a contributing factor, but telling somebody like, oh just take a bunch of vitamin D and you won't be depressed anymore, that's literally not how it ******* works. Depression is a very complex mental illness. There are a lot of components that go into why a person might be depressed and not everybody has to tick every single checkbox, but I mean you can be depressed because of a traumatic event, you can be depressed because your brain is purely just lacking in serotonin, you can be depressed because of like situational factors, there's like a whole diagnosis for that called adjustment disorder where basically your environment just ******* sucks and it's contributing to a mental illness or a disorder. We can be depressed because we have like a hormonal imbalance or because we have, there's like a whole, like I could sit here and list like a million different things or reasons why somebody might be depressed and so acting like, oh well the reason you're depressed is because you have a deficiency in all of these vitamins, like ******* no, no. Again, that might be a very small part of it, but this is the thing that like bothers me about this is that someone, especially somebody who's very depressed and very vulnerable could read this and be like, sick, I know how to fix this, I'm gonna go to the store and just dose myself on vitamin D and vitamin B12 without ever talking to a psychiatrist or a therapist or a mental health professional or like a medical doctor who actually knows how this works. And first of all, I think a lot of people don't understand that supplements actually can be dangerous. If you take too many of one thing at one time or you're not really aware, and again I'm not a doctor so I don't ******* know how this works, but if you're taking too many of one thing, you can actually hurt yourself with supplements. I think people think that they're just like little herbs and gel capsules and like that's not how that works. Supplements are also not regulated by the FDA and so we don't know for sure that there isn't something in there like a filler or something to sort of stretch the actual product to make the manufacturer of that product more profitable. We don't know for sure what's in there because there's no regulations about what people can and can't put in there. And so when somebody who's in a vulnerable place reads about vitamin D and B12 deficiencies and goes to the grocery store, or God forbid, gets on Amazon and buys some sketchy ass supplement from **** knows where and then takes a bunch of them, we don't know what that's going to do to somebody's body. We don't know if that's going to exacerbate a previous medical condition that they have or if they're going to give themselves a vitamin toxicity. I mean, it's not like taking one a day is going to give you vitamin toxicity or something like that, but just this is not it. This is not it and this is just not the way to treat it. So whatever. Moving on. It also has a little thing in here about what is anxiety, which is not... It's wrong. It talks about how your hormones are imbalanced and that's why you have anxiety and like, no, again, people can have anxiety for a whole bunch of different reasons, some of them situational. Anxiety is not necessarily always a chemical imbalance and so, like, that's stupid. But then it also has lists of foods to eat and foods to avoid. So not only are we giving people shitty medical advice when this person, let's be honest, if you're posting on Pinterest, is probably not a medical doctor, but now we're giving people this weird food restriction thing, which if you haven't seen my video about the diet culture and diet industry, I will put that in a little card up there. I think it's probably up on this side. If you haven't seen that, go watch that. But I am fiercely passionate about how we should just leave people the **** alone and let people eat what the **** they want to eat and let people tune into their own body's innate wisdom about what they should eat and what they should avoid because I can guarantee you that somebody who's posting this, I mean, let's be honest, very poorly made infographic on Pinterest is not the authority on what food you should or should not be putting in your body. Moving on. Let's talk about essential oils because most of the things on this little board that I've been collecting over the last couple of months are essential oil blends or brands and things like that. And some of them are a little bit less predatory than others, but like this one, I'll put it up on the screen right here, literally is called liquid Xanax. First of all, that doesn't exist. Second of all, advertising something that, like an essential oil, which if you don't know, essential oils are highly concentrated doses of like whatever they are like an essential oil of. They're not meant to be consumed. They're actually really dangerous. If you consume them, you can hurt yourself, you can actually burn your throat and like your skin and things like that. You can cause all different types of illness. I'll put some articles or like some links in the description for like why this is dangerous because again, I'm not a ******* doctor and I have no idea how that works, but I do know that essential oils are not something that you're supposed to put in your ******* body. And so when we're advertising essential oils as a way to treat anxiety, first of all, **** you because that's ******* terrible advice and what we should really be doing is teaching people how to like build their own skills and like tap into their inner resiliency and use therapy if they need it or lean on their support system and things like that because those are all effective and evidence-based ways to treat anxiety. Essential oils are not. But also, when we're advertising essential oils as a way to treat anxiety and also implying that they're meant to be consumed, like that's a double **** you because not only are you not giving these people evidence-based advice for how to treat a mental illness that really is debilitating for a lot of people, you're also putting them in like literal physical harms way because if I was like a young person, didn't really have access to therapy or things like that and was just like, I want to treat my anxiety, I don't know how to do this and this came up on my Pinterest feed, I'd be like ******* sick, I'm going to buy all these essential oils and put them in a little thingy and like drop them in my water every day or like you know it's liquid Xanax, right, like I can just take it, like no, no you can't, you can actually really hurt yourself with this and also like it's not even like they just said like oh just use like lavender because that's calming or whatever, there's like six different essential oils here that they recommend that you blend together and so like I don't know if any of you have ever used essential oils but these shits are expensive, like they're not cheap, like you can get some cheap ones at like Walmart or whatever but they're kind of like bullshit but like therapeutic grade essential oils are very expensive, like between ten to twelve dollars a bottle so if you're telling somebody in order to treat your anxiety you need to go buy these like six to eight different bottles of essential oils, we're looking at somewhere between eighty and a hundred dollars just for this, for someone to spend that amount of money and then potentially hurt themselves, let's be real, not actually address or treat their anxiety and then god forbid end up with like a doctor bill or like a hospital bill because they did hurt themselves, like **** you, that's so ******* predatory mean, this is not a way to treat anxiety and this is also just incredibly expensive, like you would be better off honestly paying for just one session of therapy with a therapist who even if you went and you were like listen, I saved enough money for this one session of therapy, I can't come back but I really am interested in like tools and techniques for how to deal with anxiety on a day to day basis, any good therapist would be like okay well first of all let's talk about how we can make this a feasible option for you to continue to come to therapy but also like here's this worksheet, here's this exercise, let's try grounding exercises, let's try some breathing exercises, have you tried meditation? So like if this is something that comes up on your social media and you're like tempted to try this, first of all please don't because it's dangerous but second of all take the money that you would have spent on these ******* essential oils and put it somewhere useful, like even if you spend it on a membership for one of those like meditation apps like Calm or Headspace or something like that, like that money would be far better spent somewhere else than on this literal steak oil. Let's do one more, this one is, it says top remedies for bipolar disorder, we'll put that one on this side over here, and this says ginseng, St. John's wort, ginkgo biloba. This one really rubbed me the wrong way because bipolar disorder is a very complex mental illness, this is certainly not something that you should be attempting to treat solely with supplements and again we're running into the same issue of like supplements are not regulated by the FDA and also it's just not, it's not a long term fix and it also is not, it's not safe, it's not reliable, it's just all around bad advice. If you have bipolar disorder or if you've been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and you're fixed for that or like someone is telling you they can fix it by here, take these supplements, like run away, run away because they're a liar, they don't know what they're talking about, again I would be willing to bet money that they're not a medical doctor because any medical doctor knows that these are not regulated by the FDA and there's also no evidence to support that these are an actual treatment for any kind of mental illness disorder, but also this again is like a money thing, like these can get expensive really quickly, you would be far better off trying to find a therapist with a slight fee scale, a therapist who will let you come in very infrequently or like sort of on an as needed type of basis, we have a whole video about how to find a therapist, I will put that in the tab up there, but there's lots of different affordable options for finding a therapist that over time would honest to God probably end up being cheaper than spending money on like supplements every month. So I don't take any issue with people who like essential oils just because they smell good and whatever, but they're just a lot more, in my opinion, a lot more reliable means to treat mental illness than like smell good stuff. So if you like essential oils and you like smelling them and putting them in your diffuser, like go off, have a nice time. But if your therapist is telling you or your friends or your family or some person that messaged you on Facebook after you haven't talked to them for 10 years is trying to tell you that they can cure any type of mental illness that you have with essential oils or with supplements or things like that, run, run away, because they can't, just no. So okay, this is just kind of a short little ranty video, I hope this was entertaining but also useful. Again, please, please don't ingest essential oils and please run away from anyone who tells you that they can cure your mental illness with stuff like this because they can't. Yeah, I guess that's it. Like the video, subscribe to the channel if you want to stick around, please share the video with other people because that's really helpful to me and you can help the channel grow and help each other grow. And that's it, I guess. I will talk to you soon. Okay, bye.