Reddit mentions of The Mood Cure: The 4-Step Program to Take Charge of Your Emotions--Today

Check the book The Mood Cure.

The quick notes: Fish oil deficiency has been linked to alcohol addiction.
Glutamine acts like a simpler sugar and helps block alcohol cravings.

I see a couple of things:

• You've had a very traumatic stressful year. If you have depression, I'd advise you first to try nutritherapy. Basically, what this is is employ strategies to rebuild your neurotransmitter levels, like serotonin, GABA, endorphins etc. These can be drained due to high periods of stress, and this can contribute to mood problems.
  
  You can tackle this by firstly eating more protein, which are the building blocks of neurotransmitters and help rebuild your stores. Try doubling your intake of protein. Taking an extra protein shake with each of your meals, a cheap way to accomplish this.
  
  Secondly you can take special precursor amino acids in supplement form to help you rebuild stores of specific amino acids much quicker. Examples of these are GABA, 5-HTP, and DL-phenylalanine. These work extremely well for people who are anxious and depressed.
  
  For a full guide on how to do this, I advise you read The Mood Cure by Julia Ross. Here's a link:
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Mood-Cure-4-Step-Program-Emotions-Today-ebook/dp/B000QCTPP8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524561962&sr=8-1&keywords=the+mood+cure
  
  Nutritherapy is a much better and permanent solution to mood problems and depression than taking drugs.
  
  
• I'd also try CBD oil, which can help reset your nervous system and help with stress.
  
  
• Since you say melatonin helps with sleep onset, this tells me that part of your problem is poor circadian rhythm. Melatonin is not a sleeping pill, it is a circadian signaling hormone (it tells your body when it's dark and therefore when it's time to go to sleep)
  
  You are better off trying to implement better circadian habits than just taking melatonin. Your brain is perfectly capable of producing melatonin on its own, provided you expose yourself to the right circadian cues during the day, such as daylight exposure, movement, etc. Try going for an hour long walk outside at noon and try to go outside within an hour of waking up. I would also advise you to take up exercise (try short heavy weightlifting workouts 3x/week. Stronglifts 5 x 5 is a good program) This will both help improve your metabolic health and improve your circadian rhythm. Lifting weights has also been proven to improve your mood and fight depression. Exercise at least 4 hours before bed though.
  
  Here's the app to the Stronglifts 5x5 program:
  
  https://stronglifts.com/apps/
  
  Try to implement these things at least
  
  I can go on and on here, but I'll just put a few links here to a few of my blog posts, hopefully they can give you a few more good ideas on how to improve sleep.
  
  http://thesleepstrategy.com/how-to-use-light-to-get-yourself-to-sleep/
  
  http://thesleepstrategy.com/four-punch-combo-knock-insomnia/
  

And this doctor is partly right, but again it's so complex that I don't have the time to get into it. The short version is there are so many different types of depression and different causes that medicine doesn't really differentiate against so when they run trials they're really testing like 8 different types of depression without realizing since they lump them all together. Depression can be associated with serotonin which causes low self esteem type thinking, dopamine with equates to a lack of motivation, endorphin which affects your perception of pain, oxytocin which is like heartbreak and social ostracization, or GABA which is basically anxiety.... if you don't distinguish between which TYPE of depression it is, then you run a trial on a serotonin reuptakke inhibitor, then it's only going to work for the people who have serotonin related depression, and it's not going to even work for ALL of them. That's why a lot of trials look like they're not much better than placebo.

The bottom line is that YES antidepressants do suck, but the chemical imbalance model is absolutely absolutely absolutely grounded in empirical fact. Again, read either Julia Ross's work or Loretta Breuning's work. They're two of the leading experts in the area.

http://www.amazon.com/Meet-Your-Happy-Chemicals-Endorphin/dp/1463790929

https://www.amazon.com/Mood-Cure-4-Step-Program-Emotions-Today-ebook/dp/B000QCTPP8?ie=UTF8&ref_=cm_sw_su_dp