The metabolic, inflammatory, and structural roots of mental illness — mitochondria, gut, sleep, hormones, and the growing evidence for dietary and metabolic interventions.
Physician and trauma researcher Gabor Maté argues that autoimmune disease is rarely a random biological misfortune — it is the body saying no to a lifetime of suppressed emotion, …
Depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, epilepsy, anorexia, OCD, and phobia — each has a physiological and metabolic origin. Twenty-four people, three per condition,…
Depression is not a serotonin deficiency. It is a disease of the HPA axis, mitochondrial dysfunction, and neuroinflammation. Five people who found remission through metabolic and …
Anxiety disorders begin with a failure of inhibitory GABA tone over the amygdala. Five people — generalised anxiety, panic, social, health anxiety, mixed — who found relief throug…
Bipolar disorder is, at its metabolic core, a disease of unstable brain energy production. Five people who stabilised their mood cycling through ketogenic therapy targeting the mi…
Schizophrenia involves two interacting neurochemical disruptions — mesolimbic dopamine excess and prefrontal NMDA hypofunction — both downstream of mitochondrial dysfunction and o…
Epilepsy was the first neurological condition shown to respond to ketogenic therapy — a century of evidence. Five cases illustrating how ketones raise GABA, reduce glutamate, and …
Anorexia nervosa is not a choice — it is a disorder of the hypothalamic dopamine reward circuit in which restriction becomes neurologically reinforcing. Five people who broke the …
OCD is a disease of metabolic hyperactivation in the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuit. Five people whose intrusive thought loops quietened when the metabolic overactivatio…
Specific phobias persist because fear extinction — an active, energy-demanding process — fails when PFC metabolism is impaired. Five people whose phobias became tractable once the…
PTSD is the condition that results when traumatic fear memories fail to be contextualised. Chronic cortisol shrinks the hippocampus; amygdala hyperreactivity replays the trauma. F…
ADHD is a disorder of the prefrontal cortex — specifically of the dopaminergic and noradrenergic supply that enables sustained attention and impulse control. Five people who found…
Alzheimer's disease is increasingly understood as type 3 diabetes — brain insulin resistance that starves neurons of glucose decades before clinical symptoms appear. Five people w…
Alcohol use disorder forms because ethanol hijacks the GABA and dopamine systems the brain depends on for calm and reward. When alcohol withdraws, the system crashes. Five people …
A significant subset of autism involves mitochondrial dysfunction and gut-brain axis disruption that drives neuroinflammation. Five people — children and adults — whose ASD sympto…
Depression is not a choice, a character flaw, or a failure of will — it is a biological disorder in which the brain's reward circuitry goes dark, the stress hormone system runs un…