The Dangers of heeding Good Diet advice

Mum was once persuaded by a nutritionist (who I thought was too fat, given her profession) that her diet was the root cause of her vulnerability to Depression.

My initial doubt (flashing red beacon: but we already do that whole three, or is it five? helpings of fresh fruit and veg thing every day) ought to have served as a warning. But it did not, when you are desperate (as Mum has often been, as I have too) you'll try anything.

Mum paid 150 bucks for every session conducted in the nutritionist's million dollar home, where we sank into a voluptuous sofa and drank chamomile tea. ‘Have you tried it?' the nutritionist asked, eyes disappearing into rolls of fat around her face as she grinned at us, ‘very calming in the event of anxiety'. Oh piss off I wanted to say. But I didn't. I drank my herbal brew which tasted of absolutely nothing (I'd have like a coffee but wasn't offered one; I'd have killed for a coffee - or her, with her patronizing notions of anxiety and chamomile tea). I sat and sipped and tried not to feel angry by focusing my attention on framed photographs of plumply cherubic children on the mantelpiece.

Mum, who drank her tea with distinctly more grace than I, bought tubs full of supplements and vitamins. She spent a fortune on tests: tests to check her adrenal function, tests to check her liver function, tests to monitor her cholesterol levels and her thyroid function and her hemoglobin levels. She was so well (simply because the pattern which manifested itself years ago described at upswing at the time, simply because it was her time to be well) that she allowed the nutritionist to persuade her that her wellness would be compromised if she continued to take her antidepressants, her lithium.

So she stopped.

After almost twenty years of taking her medication, she stopped.

Mum felt elated at having given up the pills - which she replaced with handfuls of colorful minerals and vitamins - exhilarated in the way a person who'd used a crutch to walk might feel when they suddenly found they could get around perfectly well without it. She gave up wheat - on her nutritionist's orders - and instead ate oat cakes for breakfast slathered with jelly. I joined in the charade and pretended the dry little crackers were a happy substitute for hot buttered toast. They weren't. She gave up soft cheeses. Which was a shame: a fat slice of camembert would have improved the bloody biscuits immeasurably.

But, the upswing crested and then plummeted. Like it had done dozens of times before. Just more steeply and more suddenly and more rollercoaster dramatically than ever before. Mum collapsed. With absolutely no trace of the drugs left in her pristine, cholesterol free, mineral brimming system, there was no lingering, residual prop to break her fall and she plunged to even greater depths; she hadn't been so low for years.

Miserably, she threw her supplements away, made an appointment to see her psychiatrist and resumed her antidepressants and her lithium; she swore never, ever to discontinue either again.

It took her six long, painful months to limp back to health.

Of course, when Mum fell sick I - indignant, furious but perversely hopeful that she might have answers - contacted the portly nutritionist and asked what, given the assurances she had made to Mum about continued good health, she recommended; Mum was sick again, sicker than ever, I told her. What now?

She didn't sound very pleased to hear from me. She sounded as if she might be in a hurry. But she thought for a moment.

And then she prescribed coffee enemas: ‘I hear they are even beneficial in the case of cancer', she added, as an afterthought. But my mum doesn't have cancer, I wanted to scream, she has Depression.

I put the phone down. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. But I did consider: so that's where the coffee went then!