‘ Treat your food as if it’s your medicine’

Twelve years ago, when she was 30, Taimi Allan laid out all the psychiatric medications that she was taking and turned to her husband Stewart.

“I said to my husband: ‘ I started on one pill when I was 15 and I’m on 10 at 30, what is this going to look like when I’m 60’?” she asked.

“And he said: ‘ I’m not living with the person that I married any more, I’m living with this half- zombie person. Do you want to see who the real Taimi is underneath all this? Are you willing to take the risk’?”

It was a crucial turning point. The “real Taimi” who met Stewart 15 years ago has acted on stage and screen since she was 15. Her credits include roles in McLeod’s Daughters, Step Dave and Shortland Street. The couple run Tigerstew Productions and performing arts school The Green Room. She is chief executive of mental health advocacy agency Changing Minds and he is music director at St Cuthbert’s College.

For 15 years, Taimi’s life was a psychological rollercoaster that “sent me into these spirals of very, very deep depression, and then high levels of functioning and high working and not sleeping very much”.

Desperate for a way out, at 23 she accepted a course of electric shock treatments. The shocks left her with awful migraines and permanently wiped some of her childhood memories — but had absolutely no effect on her mental illness.

What finally worked was changing her diet.

At 28, someone suggested that she should get her thyroid gland checked. She found that it had “died”. In fact it had probably sputtered out, producing spurts of hormones that may have explained her highs and lows.

She found Dr Ulrich Doering in Titirangi, who supported her in trying dietary and lifestyle changes to reduce her medication. She was introduced to amino acids.

“I started being really mindful about what I eat, knowing that the things I was eating and drinking and what I was doing with my body had a direct effect on my mind.”

She found she was allergic to wheat and dairy products, and cut them out of her diet. She cut back on sugar and ate more fish and leafy, green vegetables.

She endured intense pain which felt like electric shocks in the back of her neck as she came off her psychiatric medications. Her parents were worried, but Stewart supported her.

Now she feels that diet has put her back in control of her own life. “You need to treat your food as if it’s your medicine. I’m not saying it’s the total answer, but I’m sure for most people it’s a piece of the puzzle, and for me it was a huge part of the puzzle.”