Hi. My name is Rebecca Lee and I cowrote this book, The Mercury Detoxification Manual, with Andy Cutler Phd., who should have got a Nobel prize for what he figured out and a whole lot of that information is in this book. It is about how to detox from chronic mercury poisoning. Chronic mercury is a huge undiagnosed epidemic. Andy was a bit like the “voice crying out in the wilderness ” about this. And so am I. People don’t see it and people don’t understand it. I think this is because of what is called the “just world fallacy.” People cling to the idea that everything is fine and nothing really bad can be happening, and if people get hurt it is probably because they did something wrong. if you take a look at history, though, this is clearly not the case. I mean the arc of the universe does, perhaps, bend toward justice. It’s just that that bending takes time, and in the meantime, a whole lot of people have been poisoned.
I was futzing around on Twitter the other day and I came across this article about “spoonies.” It said there is a community of chronically sick young girls on social media, particularly TikTok who have come to be called that, “spoonies.” Some of them have diagnoses like MS, or autoimmune disease or fibromyalgia and so forth and some of them are just sick. Idiopathically so.
They got the name “spoonies” because one of them came up with a system to describe the energy issues they deal with. It is called “the spoon theory.” They count the daily amount of energy they have in spoons. Say a person is allotted 10 spoons a day of energy. Getting up and brushing their teeth may take one, getting breakfast another….then they only have 8 left for whatever they have to accomplish in the day, so they have to be careful. Maybe they have a 5 spoon event coming up, like a doctor’s appointment they have to drive to. Another 3 to get home and that’s it for the day. No energy left for anything more!
Some people have more spoons, others less. There are days with more spoons and days with fewer. In one video a girl said she saw that part of it more like a traffic light. Some days are red and she can’t get out of bed, others yellow and she can do a thing or two, and on a green day her energy is reasonable but not that great, really.
Now, to all you people out there struggling with chronic mercury doesn’t that sound familiar? Back when I was starting out on this trip to get better, I told a therapist that I could do about one thing a day. Like, I could go to the supermarket, or I could walk the dog….but not both. Go past my quota of energy and I would wind up “a quivering mass of biochemical wreckage,” as Andy Cutler put it so eloquently.
After about a year and a half of chelation, I posted in the Facebook support group that I had had a day that had gone as follows: My cell phone stopped working so I wanted to go to the AT&T office in the mall. I went to the mall’s back door opposite where I was living on College Street in Burlington. The escalator to the second floor was broken, and I had to walk a long way around and take the stairs. When I got up there, the office had moved! I had to go all the way back down, go home, get my bike and ride it to the new address. A bunch of other things happened, I can’t remember what. The main thing, though, was I got through it all without having to sit down on the floor and burst into tears. This was greeted with astonishment in the Facebook group. People wished they could have a day like that!
The little spoonies on TikTok are treated with some skepticism. Some educated know-it-all suggested they are reinforcing their problems and causing a mass contagion hysteria situation. This reminds me of the hysterical women in the time of Freud that the book Age of Autism talks about. Turns out that was probably chronic mercury poisoning. I think this TikTok thing is, too.
Where are the boys then, you may ask? Mercury hits boys differently. They tend to get more autism and degrees of autism. Maybe there is a group of them somewhere making in-jokes about Pepe The Frog and talking about their inability to hold jobs and what it is like to play video games in their mom’s basement.
Poor little girls! Who cares if they are self-indulgent teeny boppers making a fuss. It is not going to get any better as they get older and wiser. I wish I could get a message to them, “Hey little girls. You have chronic mercury poisoning. You can fix that. You are young, start now and you can get out of this in a few years. Don’t wait, chelate!” That’s my rallying cry! Don’t wait until you are in your 70s to figure this shit out!
Andy Cutler once said to me, that this is not the first time that there has been a mass poisoning that went unremarked. I was happy to read Catherine Austin-Fitts talking about “the great poisoning,” that has taken place in the world. Good to come across someone who noticed. Half of the little kids are sick some way or another, and now it is showing up in the teenagers and young adults. It is mercury. It always was and it still is mercury. And you can chelate that crap out and get your body to start working properly again.
Please like and share and all those good things. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could wind up with a lot of little “spoonies” to help through this getting better and over it process. Not to mention all those poor sullen boys who can’t make eye contact.