What Causes Mental Illness?
For years, this pressing question has remained unanswered.
Often, patients seeking clarity encounter explanations such as “it’s genetic” or “depression is a lack of serotonin.”
Mental illness has been an enigma and point of confusion for many researchers and scientists. Despite medical advances, the root cause of mental illness has remained unknown.
However, a recent breakthrough in psychiatry may be the missing piece to this mysterious puzzle.
Dr. Christopher Palmer, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, has been connecting the dots of thousands of research articles regarding the relationship between mental illness and mitochondrial dysfunction.
According to Palmer, this collective research raises concerns about the current treatments used for mental disorders.
A pivotal moment in 2016 started the psychiatrist on a new path when he helped a patient with schizoaffective disorder lose weight. The patient not only suffered from severe mental illness but also low self-esteem due to the weight gain he experienced while on psychotropic medication.
Palmer relayed that he initially couldn’t believe switching to a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet could stop chronic auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions. He quickly started using this intervention in other patients and saw similar—sometimes even more dramatic—results.
This experience encouraged him to begin a scientific journey to understand how a change in diet could help severe mental illness.