> The precise causes of illnesses such as schizophrenia are largely unknown, although genetics and brain-based factors are known to play an essential role.
My understanding is Psychosis is basically a metabolic disorder: people become psychotic when their brain runs out of fuel.
When I first met my friend who taught me about "mental illness", I thought she was 'high as a kite'. As the months went on, I noticed she was most chatty ("psychotic") when she was using crack cocaine. I didn't know about the term "psychosis" at the time, or that cocaine shreds the mitochondria [2][3]. When the effects of cocaine wore off, she was basically normal. When we ate well, she did pretty well. It wasn't until she ran out of alcohol that she became profoundly psychotic.
The involuntary doctors said, essentially, 'Patient expects us to believe that she was psychotic because she was drinking 2 bottles of liquor a day, and using cocaine. We know that this is not the case because we previously got her stabilized on medicine 5 years ago and 7 years ago. After those year-long orders for treatment she discontinued services. Here it is, 4 years later and she's back in the mental hospital. She's clearly been psychotic this whole time.'
I read that one of the problems of psychiatry is that they usually see people when they're at their worst, thereby missing that they were mostly functional just before they fell apart.
One of the early nutritional treatments for schizophrenia was Niacin. Psychiatrists who think in terms of drugs managed to torpedo this line of research, so our doctors tend to not think in terms of physiology. But the research is still being done:
Two-decade-long study links lack of vitamin B3 to schizophrenia among Indians - https://researchmatters.in/news/two-decade-long-study-links-...
Successful treatment of schizophrenia requires optimal daily doses of vitamin B3 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19238764/
Nutrition, NAD and exercise: vitamin B3 supplements to stay fit and healthy? - https://www.endocrinology.org/endocrinologist/135-spring20/f...
My friend eventually figured out that she's a poor methylator whose genetics are such that she can't turn folic acid (a shelf-stable provitamin B-9 used to fortify foods) into L-Methyl-Folate. (My previous comments said the treatment providers ran this test [1][2]. She later corrected me: new clients at the treatment center were getting their cheeks swabbed, she wanted to be swabbed too. The test came back that she needed methylated B-9. She'd previously said it was like flipping a switch from 'depressed' to 'not-depressed'.) But the doctors kept her on tranquilizers anyways.
Just last month she convinced her doctors to take her off tranquilizers. What's wrong with Psychiatry, that they think people become broken and require palliative treatments for the rest of their lives? Do any of you have any insights?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859585