What causes mental illness?

For years, despite medical advances, this pressing question has remained unanswered.

Weight loss brought a dramatic drop in symptoms.

Dr. Palmer said he initially couldn’t believe that switching to a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet could have stopped the patient’s chronic auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions. He quickly started using this intervention in other patients and saw similar—sometimes even more dramatic—results.

“The more I uncovered in terms of those concrete mechanisms of action, I realized there’s something much bigger here. I’m beginning to connect a lot of dots that our field hasn’t been able to connect before,” he told The Epoch Times.

In November 2022, he released a book titled “Brain Energy” highlighting his discoveries and theorizing that mitochondrial disorders are the root cause of all mental illnesses.

Drawing from decades of research on metabolism and mitochondria, Dr. Palmer said he believes that mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain. This means that these conditions aren’t permanent defects and can be corrected by identifying and addressing their root cause. This insight challenges the notion that conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are lifelong disorders.

“People with labels such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can put their illnesses into remission, they can heal, and they can recover,” he said.

Dr. Palmer said mitochondrial dysfunction can produce several changes in the brain that can cause mental illness to develop. These changes include fluctuations in neurotransmitter levels, oxidative stress, and inflammation.

If the origin of mental disorders is mitochondrial dysfunction, treatments that address the underlying issue could be more successful than traditional tools.

Medication and cognitive behavioral therapy, the standard treatment for most mental disorders, can sometimes manage symptoms but often fail to cure the disease.

Dr. Palmer, whose clinical work spans more than two decades and focuses on the most treatment-resistant cases of mental illness, discovered that many patients struggling with mental illness also demonstrate signs of mitochondrial dysfunction. Addressing the fundamental mitochondrial disorder can often improve their mental health condition. Some of his patients have experienced remission of mild to severe symptoms, including depression, psychosis, and hallucinations, and then reduced or discontinued their medications.

“We seriously need to look at the risks and benefits of those treatments over the long term,” Dr. Palmer said.

One of the ways the ketogenic diet benefits mitochondrial health is through the production of ketones. When the body is in ketosis, it produces ketones from stored fat as an alternative, more efficient fuel source. These ketones can provide energy to cells, including brain cells, which rely heavily on mitochondria for their energy needs.

Mitochondria assist in the production of neurotransmitters, chemicals that influence mood and behavior, such as serotonin and dopamine.

According to the review, preclinical studies at the time found that the diet had antidepressant and mood-stabilizing effects.

“Ketogenic diet has profound effects in multiple targets implicated in the pathophysiology of mood disorders,” it reads.

The researchers said the diet should be considered a “promising intervention.”

“Psychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder and binge eating disorder, are neurometabolic diseases that share several common mechanistic biopathologies,“ the authors wrote. ”These include glucose hypometabolism, neurotransmitter imbalances, oxidative stress, and inflammation. There is strong evidence that ketogenic diets can address these four fundamental diseases, and now complementary clinical evidence that ketogenic diets can improve the patients’ symptoms.”

There have also been studies that put those theories into action.

It was tested on patients in a psychiatric hospital whose symptoms were poorly controlled despite intensive psychiatric management.

“We have hundreds of cases of people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia putting their illnesses into remission. Scientists are pursuing this. We have at least 10 controlled trials of the ketogenic diet for serious mental illness underway now. One is getting ready to publish their pilot trial results soon,” Dr. Palmer said.

“There is a lot of momentum behind this. This groundbreaking theory opens up entirely new ways for us to conceptualize and treat mental illness going forward. Studies are already underway and rapidly advancing, yet this can have real results in real people today.”