#1 Herb for Depression and Mental Health

Hey, I want to introduce you to a really beautiful little plant that's a rock star for all kinds of things in your nervous system. So I'm Dr. Patrick Jones from the Homegrown Herbalist School of Botanical Medicine, and we're up here in northern Idaho, up in the tippy top of the panhandle, almost in Canada, in this really beautiful conifer forest. And this is St. John's wort. It's all over up here growing wild. It's wild. This one's easy to grow about anywhere else. I grow it down in the cold deserts of southern Idaho too in my herb gardens. But it's really a beautiful little plant. It's got a little five petaled flowers. Really just a lovely little creature. The flower is the medicine and the species is is Hypericum perforatum, St. John's Wort. It's the old English word for plant. Motherwort, pigwort, woundwort, soldierwort. Anyway, this is St. John's wort. Thank you for your support. But really an attractive little flower. And like I said, the flower is the medicine. And a good way to see if it's a really good one, you know, if it's ready to harvest, is to just rub that flower on your skin and you'll get that purple stain. I don't know if you can see it. But see that purple? I don't have a bruise there. That's the St. John's wort, purple juice. Okay. Anyway, like I said, the flower is the medicine. And it's a really powerful herb that affects neurotransmitters. And so the neurotransmitters are the chemistry in your brain that does all the signaling and all the communication between the nerves and the central nervous system. And, uh, And so St. John's wort is really fantastic for... All kinds of neurologic conditions. It balances and corrects and harmonizes a lot of those neurotransmitter functions. For some people, it's really, really effective for depression, for bipolar disorder, things like that. Particularly, in my experience with folks, if you combine it with lemon balm, those two together seem to be really effective for some people. It's also really good for pain. It's got some anti-inflammatory properties also. So, you know, it is good for pain because it's telling the nerves to quit screaming, but it's also got some anti-inflammatory properties, especially for skin pain. For some reason, skin things, wounds, rashes, itchiness, bladder, irritations, interstitial cystitis, things like that that are really painful and miserable. Sometimes St. John's works really well for that. Let's see, what else? It has some antiviral properties. It has properties against retroviruses. Which are things like HIV in humans, feline leukemia, and FIV in cats, you know, has some activity suppressing those. It has some antibacterial properties too, mostly against gram-positives like Staph and Strap. It doesn't do anything against gram-negative bacteria like E. coli and Salmonella, it doesn't fight those guys. But Staph infections, even MRSA, St. John's wort can be useful. They're just a great, great plant. One thing to be aware of that's really critical from a safety standpoint is you do not want to combine this plant if somebody's taking any pharmaceuticals, especially mental health pharmaceuticals. You know, it's got to be one or the other. Don't mix St. John's wort with any of those guys. But even if it's not a mental health pharmaceutical, St. John's wort, because of its interactions with the liver and the enzymes that the liver uses to get rid of... medications and things like that, St. John's Wort can really disrupt and goof up the body's elimination of pharmaceuticals. And so, you know, you're taking a dose of medicine and the St. John's Wort is keeping you from eliminating that dose of medicine or accelerating your elimination of that dose of medicine. And I just... Makes it impossible to do the dosing right and to know how much is in you. And maybe it doesn't last as long as it should, or maybe it lasts way longer than it should because the first dose never went away, right? And so this is a plant of all the plants. If somebody's on pharmaceuticals, I don't even think about this one until I've really, really studied specifically what drug is that, how is it eliminated, by what enzyme chains and pathways is it eliminated, and then sometimes I'll do it. But as a rule of thumb, don't combine with pharmaceuticals at all. But other than that, great plant, good safety margins. Don't take it if you're nursing. I probably wouldn't do it if I was pregnant, but I've never been pregnant, so I wouldn't really know. Anyway, I'm Doc Jones from the Homegrown Herbalist School of Botanical Medicine. Thanks for listening.