the nuance
The Cellular Link Between Mental Illness and Metabolic Disease
A Harvard psychiatrist argues that mitochondrial dysfunction underlies both.
At age 33, Tom had spent most of his adult life struggling with schizoaffective disorder. He experienced daily hallucinations and delusions and was plagued by anxiety and depression.
Medications helped him control some of his symptoms, but they also caused him to gain weight. Heavy to begin with, he put on more than 100 pounds. He didn’t want to see another doctor, and so he asked his psychiatrist for help. They tried several diets without success before they gave the ketogenic diet a shot.
Within a few weeks, Tom had begun to lose weight. To his doctor’s surprise, his psychiatric symptoms also mellowed. After two months on the diet, these changes were even more dramatic. Eventually Tom lost more than 150 pounds, and his mental state improved to the point that he could move out of his father’s house and live on his own.
“I was flabbergasted,” recalls his psychiatrist, Christopher Palmer. “This man had a psychotic disorder that had resisted more than a decade of treatment. Nothing in my knowledge or experience suggested that the ketogenic diet would treat his symptoms.”
