What is schizophrenia? According to WebMD:
“Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe, mental disorder that affects the way a person thinks, acts, expresses emotions, perceives reality, and relates to others.”
When people hear the word schizophrenia they often think of someone who hears voices and sees frightful hallucinations. This is definitely part of it. They can also have bizarre and abnormal behavior. They may have psychotic episodes during which they break from reality and behave according to what is going on in their own minds. And they can sometimes be quiet and withdrawn, or just the opposite — loud, angry, obnoxious, or even threatening.
The severity varies from person to person, and from time to time. It may go into remission and suddenly come back again.
Schizophrenia usually appears in a young man’s late teens or 20s, and a woman’s 20s or 30s. The symptoms can be so varied it may be difficult for family and friends to notice that anything serious might be wrong for a while. Taken one by one they may not be considered serious, but taken together, they may begin to be a concern.
In the case of my son, I believe it began with the long walks. Taken by itself, it was just something he liked to do. He was about 18 when they started. He would be gone for hours, sometimes all day. He would plug in his earphones and cover 10 to 20 miles sometimes! It was even more concerning because he was also autistic. Looking back I think his brain was already on the spectrum starting with autism and gradually continuing into psychosis.
Because he was autistic, he already demonstrated odd behaviors that our family had grown used to, over the years. It was hard to notice any real transitions until he hit the age of 18 when he began to hear voices through his cell phone. And of course, the long walks, which lasted until way after dark, most days.
After a few years of this, the voices started telling him to do things, very specific things. He simply obeyed the voices and ended up getting arrested, and sentenced. A judge told him that he had to start and remain on psych meds for at least a seven-year probation, which would start with a three-month stay in a sanitarium.
This was a shocking and heart-breaking time for the family. We knew our son was different, but we loved him just the way he was. We never dreamt it would turn into this nightmare.
Time went by, and seven years finally passed, but unfortunately, he stayed on the meds. He began a simple job in his father’s company, in the shipping department. Life settled down to a routine once again.
He is now in his 40s and still on the medication. My son gained about 100lbs due to his prescription. It is also known to cause insulin resistance, high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome, liver toxicity, and even diabetes. My heart’s desire is to get him onto the Keto/Carnivore diet and wean him off the medication.
There are apparently more hurdles ahead for those who want to get free from medication. One of them is Tardive Dyskinesia. This is a sad condition caused by the same psych meds that were prescribed to control the schizophrenia! It usually starts after the patient stops their medication. With Tardive Dyskinesia the person has all kinds of involuntary movements of the face and body from mild, to full-body movements some of which are almost like they are playing charades. According to some sources, about 25% of patients stopping their meds may be afflicted with this condition.
A Word About Paranoid Schizophrenia
Simply put, paranoid schizophrenia is schizophrenia with the added delusion that others are watching or monitoring them, and/or trying to harm them.
This happened to my son as well. He believed the government was monitoring him through his cell phone. He also progressed to believing that aliens were shooting him from their ships through his bedroom window at night, causing him burning pain that he actually felt. This was so real to him that he would drag his bureau in front of the window almost every night for a while. There were other bizarre manifestations as well.
Schizophrenia and Diet Research — Is There an Alternative to Medication?
Ketosis has long been known to help and heal the brain. It was first used by modern physicians to help epileptic patients control seizures in the 1920s. The ketogenic diet was found to mimic the metabolism of fasting, and therein lies its effectiveness. On July 27, 1921, the Mayo Clinic’s Russell Wilder, MD first proposed the use of the ketogenic diet to trick the body into believing it is fasting. They tested the theory on adults and children and found it worked! After that, it was widely used by other institutions, including Johns Hopkins.¹ Fasting itself has been used to treat epilepsy since 500 BC. It has also been able to help those with bipolar, schizophrenia, and autism.
Studies have identified a clear association between epilepsy and other mental disorders including depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Also included in this list are other psychotic disorders such as bipolar and Parkinson’s disease. It is my personal belief after much research and study that all these brain diseases are related and on a psychotic spectrum from mild to serious. I believe they have a shared root cause. Why? One reason is that they are all helped by ketosis!
Case Studies
Let’s take a look at some compelling examples of people who demonstrate the healing effect of ketogenic diets:
This is from an article by Doctors Kraft and Westman, out of Duke University, NC. You can read it here. It’s amazing! This 70-year-old lady suffered terribly most of her life with frightening, psychotic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.She was suicidal. She cut herself. She ingested cleaning agents. The lady saw skeletons and experienced other visual and auditory hallucinations, some that told her to hurt herself. This poor, afflicted individual had these hallucinations every day since the age of seventeen!Her doctors had tried a whole litany of anti-psychotic and mood-stabilizing drugs, all with little to no effect.She also suffered from a host of medical problems in addition to her schizophrenia: obesity, depression, sleep apnea, gastroesophageal reflux disease, urinary incontinence, glaucoma, gall bladder problems, and more.She was living on the typical American diet with plenty of simple carbohydrates, sugar, and cheap fats. Then at age 70, her doctors decided to put her on a ketogenic diet of fewer than 20 grams of carbohydrates per day.After 53 years of a hellish mental illness, in only seven days she reported feeling better with an increase in energy! By the next day, she was no longer hearing voices or seeing skeletons! She reports her happiness and calmness upon the disappearance of these horrible symptoms. And after a year of living on a ketogenic diet, she has had no recurrence of hallucinations! She continued to lose body fat and gain energy.
Let’s take a look at another one. Dr. Pacheco and his associates tried a ketogenic diet with 10 women suffering from longstanding symptoms of schizophrenia. The researchers observed significantly lower symptom severity after only two weeks on the diet! Symptoms worsened in seven out of the ten volunteers when they returned to their normal carbohydrate diets.²
Dr. Palmer, in 2017, described a case involving a 33-year-old man who had symptoms of schizophrenia for 14 years. He had been tried on multiple antipsychotic drugs with incomplete results. His PANNS score started out at 96 when he began the ketogenic diet. Within a year his score dropped to 49, which is a significant achievement. He was able to enjoy a much-improved life, both socially and occupationally. (PANNS is a rating scale based on 30 questions used to assess positive and negative symptoms in an objective way — each answer receives a score of one or more, the lowest possible score is 30, which is the best score.)²
The link to Dr. Palmer is an affiliate link for his new book, Brain Energy, in which he expounds the science of using ketosis to heal the brain. If you purchase through my link I'll make a tiny commission at no cost to you.
In every case I read, the majority of patients did well while they remained in a ketogenic state, but relapsed when they resumed 20 or more grams of carbohydrates per day, bringing them out of ketosis.
Schizophrenia does not define a person. It’s not who you are. It’s a collection of symptoms appearing in your body due to certain conditions your body has been coping with. Symptoms of any disease can be seen as the body’s cry for help. Correct the internal environment and watch symptoms disappear in many cases.
I think it should be shouted from the rooftops that mental illness can be relieved and oftentimes cured through a delicious and satisfying high-fat, low or no-carb diet! Get away from those harmful, poisonous chemicals that mask some symptoms while causing others! True healing is what these patients need. The truth will always set people free.
There’s a new day coming when mental illness, as well as other types of illnesses, will be addressed with the Proper Human Diet³ first, and harmful drugs will be the last resort!
3 Dr. Ken Berry
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