Integrative Medicine for Mental Health is a new and exciting approach to therapy that acknowledges the body-mind connection. It recognizes the reality that what happens in your body impacts your mood, reactions, outlook, and ability to manage stress.

This therapeutic model combines conventional and research-based complementary methods to address the many factors influencing your emotional and psychological health.

As a therapist, I’ve seen firsthand how this approach can boost counseling results, making positive change quicker and more profound.

If we don’t consider physical factors that might be impacting your anxiety, irritability, stress, and depression, the best psychological therapy techniques can result in us spinning our wheels. They might help, but only get us so far.

Mental health issues often involve an interplay of biology, personal history, lifestyle, and stressors. That’s why the integrative framework is so valuable—it provides multiple tools to address challenges and builds a foundation for lasting well-being.

Integrative Medicine for Mental Health (IMMH)

What Is Integrative Medicine for Mental Health?

"The mind and body are not separate. What affects one, affects the other." — Joseph Pilates

Integrative medicine for mental health (IMMH) combines evidence-based complementary treatments with conventional counseling and medicine to address the whole person. The goal is to approach mental health from multiple angles and optimize both the wellness outcome and the process of getting there.

This mental health specialty isn’t just about treating symptoms like anger or anxiety with listening, psychological root cause analysis, or skill building.
It’s about investigating whether something physical is contributing to that anger or anxiety.

It’s a super-efficient personalized way to get at what is happening for an individual, thinking about what might help, and assisting them to try small changes that may make a big difference in improving their life.

For example, a treatment plan might include challenging distorted thoughts with cognitive behavioral therapy, paired with diet changes and recommendations for improving sleep quality.

Complementary and Alternative Medicine: What's the Difference?

Before we go on, let's clarify a few terms that might be confusing.

Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) refers to healthcare approaches that don't have a long history in what is commonly considered mainstream Western medicine. CAM therapies and professions include:

• Naturopathy
• Nutrition
• Acupuncture
• Massage
• Yoga

The two labels—alternative and complementary—are slightly different. 

Alternative is an older label that implies replacing conventional care entirely.

Complementary refers to using these methods alongside mainstream treatments, such as those provided by counselors and medical doctors.

Integrative Medicine for Mental Health brings together a variety of therapeutic concepts and professionals to create a complementary framework for building emotional and psychological well-being. 

How Integrative Medicine for Mental Health Works

What’s going on in your body impacts your mind, and what’s going on in your mind impacts your body.

It’s a circle that can turn into a spiral that goes down or up.

We want to stop downward spirals and create upward spirals so you can feel better and better.

We can interrupt the circle by doing something that improves your brain’s inner workings or how your body is functioning. But what if we can do both?

That’s where Integrative Medicine for Mental Health comes in!

Pieces of the IMMH Puzzle

Integrative Medicine for Mental Health takes a comprehensive view of emotional and psychological well-being, appreciating the interplay between the mind and body.

Think of it as assembling a puzzle where each piece represents a component of your mental health. Together, these pieces form a complete picture of well-being, addressing root causes and fostering lasting change.

The following key IMMH components illustrate the foundation of this holistic approach, showing how each piece contributes to solving the puzzle of mental health challenges:

• Psychotherapy: Psychotherapy remains an essential element of Integrative Medicine for Mental Health. Techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), talk therapy, and EMDR provide the structure for understanding emotions, processing past experiences, and reshaping negative thought patterns. When paired with other IMMH elements, psychotherapy ensures that the mind is supported as part of a holistic approach to well-being.

• Medication: Use of mental health pharmaceuticals can be part of an integrated strategy.

• Nutrition: IMMH appreciates that foods and beverages in your regular diet might be negatively impacting your emotional wellness and explores whether reducing certain items or adding others might lead to improvement.

• Supplements: Vitamins, minerals, herbs, and other forms of nutritional supplementation are assessed for deficiencies and their possible value in supporting your particular therapeutic goals.

• Lifestyle Habits: Self-care and daily routines such as exercise and sleep patterns are considered for improvement potential.

• Mind-Body Practices and Therapies: Mindfulness techniques, meditation, and complementary therapies (e.g., massage, acupuncture, and yoga) are evaluated for their capacity to support emotional and physical well-being.

By recognizing that help can come from a variety of directions, IMMH creates a personalized holistic approach.

Each piece helps you understand how emotional, physical, and lifestyle factors interact, empowering you to address not just symptoms but the underlying causes.

With this assistance, you can build a complete picture of well-being, unlocking increased life satisfaction, happiness, and stress resilience.

What are the Benefits of Integrative Medicine for Mental Health (IMMH)?

Integrative Medicine for Mental Health has been celebrated as a transformative approach to care, offering a “treasure chest” of opportunities to address mental and emotional well-being. Doctors affiliated with Northwestern University emphasize its potential in their 2017 journal article, Integrative Medicine and Mood, Emotions, and Mental Health:

“Integrative medicine holds a treasure chest of opportunities and interventions to support, manage, and treat an individual’s mental and emotional health.”

Here are some of the key benefits that make this approach so impactful.

Creates an Integrated Team

IMMH encourages collaboration among diverse medical providers, integrating conventional treatment—like psychotherapy and psychiatry—with complementary medicine—such as naturopathy, acupuncture, yoga, and massage.

By respecting the unique expertise and insight each discipline brings, this model encourages a cooperative and holistic approach to care.

Offers Personalized Care

No two individuals are alike. This plays out with IMMH in two ways:

1. By addressing physical, emotional, and environmental factors, treatment can be tailored to the unique needs of each person.

2. As a patient, you can choose which approaches are a fit for your circumstances, values, and goals. 

Delivers Efficient, Effective Results

The combination of evidence-based complementary practices and conventional treatments provides targeted support that often delivers faster, deeper results any one of them could achieve alone.

Reduces Reliance on Medication

Some mental health disorders require pharmaceutical treatment. Some may be helped by it in some circumstances. For many people and conditions, the integrative medicine model provides viable alternatives or complements to pharmaceutical treatments.

Therapy and natural remedies can help minimize side effects, reduce dosages, or eliminate the need for medication.

Promotes Preventive Health

Integrative mental health practices emphasize building healthier habits and resilience. This forward-thinking approach helps prevent symptom escalation and lays the groundwork for lasting wellness and adaptability.

Broadens Access to Care

A 2024 special report from Psychiatric News, titled Integrative Medicine in Psychiatry: Beyond Just Treating the Disease, highlights how expanded use of complementary practices can improve mental health care accessibility:

“Incorporation of integrative and preventive psychiatric medicine into primary care and behavioral health care settings indirectly expands behavioral health access by promoting wellness and decreasing the need for psychiatric specialty care referrals.”

These benefits highlight why Integrative Medicine for Mental Health is a powerful tool in improving accessibility, promoting holistic care, and delivering sustainable results that enhance quality of life.

What Can Integrative Medicine for Mental Health Help With?

IMMH creates a comprehensive framework for addressing mental health challenges by considering the whole person—mind, body, and lifestyle. By blending traditional methods with complementary practices, it can support a wide range of diagnoses and concerns, including those listed below.

• Anxiety disorders

• PTSD

• Bipolar Disorder

• Depression

• Chronic stress

• Insomnia

• Burnout

• Trauma recovery

• Mood swings

• Cognitive decline, Dementia

• ADHD and focus issues

• Chronic pain with mental health implications

• Emotion regulation

• Anger

• Addiction

These are just some issues holistic care can help with. By addressing underlying factors and enhancing overall wellness, this approach provides individuals with a wealth of tools to navigate challenges and improve their quality of life.

My Interest in a Holistic Approach to Mental Health

Though I’ve been a counselor for a couple of decades, it isn’t my first career. My first career was in Medical Lab Technology. I spent many years working in large hospital labs, specializing in microbiology, before transitioning to counseling.

I’ve always been intrigued by ways to maximize health through natural approaches like diet and exercise and relied on both allopathic doctors (MD) and naturopaths (ND) as my personal physicians. My medical background and personal experiences made me very excited to see Integrative Medicine for Mental Health emerge as a therapy discipline!

Since the inception of my private counseling practice, I’ve included questions about nutrition, sleep, and supplements on my personal history intake forms.
Along with the many traditional psychology tools in my therapy toolbox, I was able to help many clients by exploring whether their caffeine intake was contributing to anger issues, low vitamin D was linked to depressed mood, or how regular exercise could enhance their stress resilience.

Completing advanced training and earning certification in IMMH enabled me to up my game.

Clients who were having difficulty meeting their therapeutic goals got unstuck, and others who were doing well were able to uplevel their improvements.

I love the additional knowledge I’ve gained from this burgeoning field and the opportunity to share it with others.

My passion for this subject also inspired me to spend four years researching and writing a related book, Feed Your Calm: Anti-Anxiety Anti-Stress Diet and Supplement Tips for Stress Resilience.

Complementary Medicine Elements of IMMH

Mental health care benefits from diverse approaches that compliment psychotherapy and medication. Whether through nourishing the body, enhancing daily routines, or incorporating techniques to calm the mind, these practices provide powerful tools for improving emotional and psychological well-being.

Nutrition and Diet

Diet plays a pivotal role in mental health.

Research has revealed that inflammation is a factor in many mental health conditions. What you eat can instigate or mitigate inflammation.

Nutrient-rich foods provide building blocks for neurotransmitters, essential brain chemicals, hormone production and balance, and biochemical reactions. On the flip side, a poor diet stresses your body and your mind.

Examples of how diet impacts mental health:

• Caffeine is a stimulant that can contribute to anxiety and anger, and interfere with sleep. How well and fast caffeine gets metabolized differs person to person and throughout an individual’s life. Even a morning cup of coffee may interfere with a good night’s sleep in some people under some circumstances.

• Your body is 50-60% water. Research has shown that even mild dehydration can cause negative changes in mood and energy, increased confusion and anxiety, and poorer sleep quality.

Supplements

We can’t always get the optimal nutrients for our specific needs through diet. Sometimes we need to give them a boost by taking vitamins, minerals, oils, probiotics, herbs or other supplements.

For example:

• Magnesium: Many of my clients are amazed at how taking simple magnesium gummies improve their stress resilience and sleep.

• Vitamin D: I live in the Seattle area of Washington State in the US. Our seasons are broken into what I call the sunny season and rainy season. We get many months of overcast weather. Almost everyone who lives here has low vitamin D in the dark months. Supplementation can be required to optimize vitamin D for the biochemical processes it facilitates, including those that impact depression and anxiety.

• Adaptogens: This class of herbal remedies have been used for centuries in many parts of the world. Adaptogens, like ashwagandha and maca root, help us adapt to stress. Though they are plant-based, we can’t really get the benefits from consuming them as food. We can take them as powders added to shakes, capsules, teas, or tinctures.

Lifestyle

Supporting mental health through daily habits is crucial.

Key lifestyle factors include:

• Sleep Hygiene: Stress impacts sleep and sleep impacts how well you deal with stress. There are many natural remedies for improving sleep including targeted nutrients like L-theanine and physical sleep aids such as weighted blankets.

• Physical Activity: Twenty minutes of moderate exercise can improve mood for up to eight hours.

Mind-Body Practices

Practices like mindfulness, breathing exercises, and other grounding resetting techniques are well-supported by research for their mental health benefits. They can:

• Reduce stress and anxiety.

• Improve focus and emotional regulation.

• Promote a sense of calm and well-being.

Complementary Therapies

Here are some examples of additional healing and wellbeing therapies:

• Acupuncture may help regulate mood and reduce stress.

• Massage Therapy eases tension and supports relaxation.

• Biofeedback teaches awareness and control of physiological responses to stress.

• Aromatherapy uses essential oils like lavender or bergamot to promote relaxation and mood balance.

By incorporating these complementary elements into mental health care, you and your providers can address challenges from multiple angles, creating a well-rounded approach.

Example Case: How an Integrative Approach Can Help

I worked with a client for several months addressing her turmoil over relationship issues, grief, anger, and anxiety. Though we had a quick discussion about supplements, diet, and lifestyle aspects of her routines at her first appointment, she wasn’t interested in investigating any of that at the time.

We focused our work on emotion skill-building, cognitive behavior therapy to address rumination, relaxation techniques, and problem-solving. We made great progress on the presenting issues, but she recognized there was still too much overreaction going on.

I broached the subject of supplements and diet again. This time, she was ready to absorb the information. A plan was made for cutting back on caffeine and adding magnesium to her daily routine.

She was so excited at her next appointment and couldn’t hardly wait to share the results of her experiments with the plan! She discovered she had been consuming more caffeine than she realized and decided to cut it out entirely. And she was taking the magnesium nightly.

These were life-altering changes for her. The rumination was way down, and she was amazed at how things that used to set off anxiety and anger weren’t doing that anymore.

The mix of all the things she had learned through our earlier work and the diet and nutrition changes was a powerful combination to set her up for ongoing stress resilience and adaptability, and improved relationships.

Next Steps

If you are curious about this approach, you can explore complementary aspects of your mental health on your own, use my website search bar to find more articles that may interest you, or pick up a copy Feed Your Calm: Anti-Anxiety Anti-Stress Diet and Supplement Tips for Stress Resilience.

f you would like to explore working with me as a client, complete the contact form and we can set up a free half-hour consultation.

Taking charge of your mental health starts with small, meaningful steps. Whether you explore these integrative methods on your own, dive deeper with my book, or reach out for a consultation, I’m here to support your journey toward lasting well-being.

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