Brain Energy, Mitochondria, and Mental Health with Dr. Chris Palmer

the brain energy Theory suggests that mental disorders are metabolic disorders affecting the brain what I am arguing is that when people's brains are malfunctioning and resulting in symptoms of chronic depression or anxiety or bipolar symptoms or psychotic symptoms that the reason for that the foundational reason for the brain to malfunction in those ways is metabolic in nature and in fact understanding this opens up entirely new ways to to think about and to treat mental illness welcome back to metabolic mind I'm your host Dr Brett sure metabolic mind is a non-profit initiative a bazooki group where

we're exploring this connection between metabolic health and mental health and metabolic therapies like ketogenic therapies as treatment for mental illness and today we're joined by Dr Chris Palmer once again to dig deeper into this concept of mitochondria and how mitochondria play a role in mental health and in mental illness and and also about just brain energy and how the connection between brain energy and mitochondria now if you're interested at all in mitochondria mental health you've probably heard of Dr Chris palmer but he's the director of the Department of postgraduate and continuing education at McLean Hospital

and assistant professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and he's a Harvard psychiatrist and researcher working at the interface of metabolism and mental health and he published his book Brain energy and since then as you'll hear us discuss has been just a whirlwind of speaking engagements in podcasts because of the interest in this you could call it a a new Theory or really sort of a compilation of of evidence and research that's been out there into this theory of brain energy with mitochondria being at the at the core of that and you can find more

about Dr Palmer at brainenergy.com I can sign up for his newsletter which is uh really educational and on Twitter he's at Chris palmermd on Twitter so but before we get into the interview please remember this channel is for informational purposes only we're not providing a group or individual medical or Health Care advice or establishing a provider patient relationship a lot of the things we talk about whether it refers to medications or nutritional ketosis or their lifestyle interventions can be potentially harmful and dangerous if not done without clinical supervision so please do not take any of

this as advice to do on your own and please use this as information to bring to your clinical team to discuss if it's appropriate for you now with that let's get on with this really really insightful and enjoyable interview with Dr Chris Palmer so Chris thank you so much for joining me again here at metabolic mind and wow what a year it's been not even a year in November of 22 you published brain energy and it seems like every week I see you somewhere else whether it's the huberman podcast or whether it's Tim Ferriss podcast

or giving talks at different conferences there's been such a whirlwind seeming like surrounding this book so first how are you doing how are you doing with all this honestly it's a little overwhelming at times uh it's um it's flattering and humbling um it's inspiring uh so you know I'm actually really thrilled and delighted that so many people are understanding what I was hoping to convey and I think people who had no idea that metabolic health and mental health could be related are now opening their eyes and uh and I think you know the most heartwarming

thing is that I am literally hearing from thousands of people around the world who are transforming their mental health using metabolic treatment strategies I'll also say that the heartbreaking thing for me as a clinician is that I'm also hearing from thousands of people begging for help they've read the book they they've seen me on a podcast they've they understand the theory but they don't know exactly what to do for their loved ones or for themselves or they're running into problems with medications or adjusting medications or how to do the diet or how to get their

ketones higher or other complications how to get better sleep and they're asking for help and right now we don't have enough clinicians to treat these people and you know for me as a clinician knowing that help is available that there are solutions for these people it's frustrating and heartbreaking yeah I can see that I mean you've inspired so many people to dig deeper and take charge of their own health but you're one person so you know how many of those people can you can you actually help so we need more people so let me ask

you about sort of the clinician response I mean it's clear what your your message and the Brain energy uh proposal hypothesis description that it's really resonated with people but what about with clinicians how have you seen you know their response or their pushback or their acceptance you know it's been a mixed bag so many clinicians have not read the book they don't really understand the theory they just hear the sound bite mental disorders or metabolic disorders and they dismiss it out of hand there's no way that could be true if that was true I would

have been taught that in medical school it would be front page news in the New York Times And The Wall Street Journal and given that it's not it must not be true um the really inspiring thing is that leading scientists psychiatrists neuroscientists and others have been hot on this Trail for decades so some of them are feeling like it's about time why it's about time people are talking about this we've been trying for years to get people to take this seriously what's taken so long um so I and then you know what's really uh inspiring

for me is when I hear from clinicians who say I was really skeptical I didn't think this could possibly be true but one of my patients read your book or watched you on a podcast or heard about the ketogenic diet for mental illness and they did it themselves and before my eyes I'm seeing this patient that I have known for years transform into a new person they're coming back to life their symptoms are diminishing or completely going away they're able to function in ways that I've never seen before and so now I'm sold Chris Palmer

I'm sold like what can I do to help or what what can we do and um you know there's the old saying seeing is believing and and this can be really hard to believe that a diet or that the other strategies outlined in brain energy could actually restore the health of somebody with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder it can be really hard to believe but when people see it and see the transformations in front of their own eyes it becomes real yeah that is powerful I mean as a as a clinician to see your patient transform

and then to sort of dig deeper and figure out why and understand that oh it was because of this brain energy concept it was because of this metabolic intervention but you can understand sort of the skepticism right I mean you know how difficult it is to treat someone with quote unquote treatment resistant bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or a major depression it is really challenging and and I think that sort of whole in terms of how Psychiatry treats people is what is on the one hand ready for a revolution if you want to use that word

with a metabolic treatment but also sort of resistant to it because it's sort of like nothing works so I mean if you're if you were gonna give advice to the skeptical um psychiatrist who said we weren't taught this these patients are just too difficult to treat um what is the one thing you can tell them to say this is worth trying the one thing that I would say that usually gets the most traction is that although you may have your own ideas about what the ketogenic diet is and whether it's a dangerous diet or a

fad diet or just a weight loss craze in fact the ketogenic diet is a 100 year old evidence-based treatment for epilepsy it can stop seizures even when medications fail to stop seizures and it turns out as you know as a mental health clinician we use epilepsy treatments in tens of millions of people every day who have mental health disorders and some of them are on label meaning the FDA has approved their use for the specific condition but the overwhelming majority of them are off-label treatments meaning that we use epilepsy treatments for a wide range of

diagnoses even though we don't have randomized controlled trials because we know that if something stops seizures it may in fact be able to help people with mental disorders whether it's a mood disorder a psychotic disorder anxiety a substance use disorder an eating disorder dementia we use them for almost everything and so in that respect the ketogenic diet is nothing new it is an evidence-based treatment for epilepsy we are using it off label right now quote unquote in people with serious mental disorders and lo and behold it's working that I mean that is powerful 100 Years

of clinical experience and Decades of research and one brain disorder that is closely linked to another I can see how that's so powerful but but now if we talk about brain energy I mean it almost depends on sort of how deep you want to go to understand it because at its core it's about the way the brain produces energy and a dysfunction in that energy production but going even deeper you get to these little little bits called the mitochondria and that's where the energy is coming from and we recently had an interview with Dr Martin

Picard who is a you know preeminent mitochondrial researcher but if I think one place that some people get lost is going from brain energy to mitochondria because you can't see mitochondria you can't feel mitochondria you can't you know it people don't necessarily have a good grasp of what mitochondria are or how to impact them um so how do you like to connect with us and and that could be for Physicians too right because how many like everyday Physicians unless you deal with inborn genetic mitochondrial disorders how many Physicians think about mitochondria every day so how

do you help people connect the dots between psychiatric symptoms brain energy production and mitochondria at the core most people have heard that or were taught that mitochondria are the PowerHouse of the cell and so they create energy and that is really the play on words for brain energy um and there is no doubt they serve that role and they perform that function they take food and oxygen and turn it into or transform it into ATP um the energy molecule of the cell but in fact research over the last 20 years has completely shattered that simplistic

definition of mitochondria and that is critically important to the brain energy Theory it's not simply energy mitochondria play a role in directing and allocating resources for cells and that means that they are taking food and some of it most of it is getting turned into ATP but some of it is getting turned into serotonin some of it's getting turned into dopamine some of it's getting turned into cortisol and in fact mitochondria play a critical role in regulating all of those molecules that I just mentioned and anybody familiar with the mental health field will know wait

neurotransmitters and hormones we know that those can become dysregulated or imbalanced in people with mental illness mitochondria are a way to understand that dysregulation or those imbalances mitochondria play a role in inflammation turning it both on and off mitochondria play a role in sending signals to the cell nucleus meaning they play a role in epigenetics or the expression of different genes at different times mitochondria are sensing our environments and that means sensing levels of stress sensing the food we eat sensing the levels of oxygen but they're also sensing blood glucose levels and other things and

responding appropriately and here's the shocking thing and Dr Martin Picard is one of the Pioneers in this field mitochondria play a role in our response to trauma psychological and social stressors and that is powerful because we know that trauma and psychological and social stressors play a role in mental illness we have known that for millennia but we've never understood exactly how it works at a biological level and so in many ways mitochondria are a way to begin to connect the dots of the mental health puzzle neurotransmitters trauma stress drugs and alcohol sleep all of these

things are either impacting mitochondria and metabolic health or being impacted by mitochondria or metabolic health and in some cases they are bi-directional relationships and once and for all it's a way to connect so many dots that we've long been trying to connect so it's a way to connect physical health with mental health we have long known that people with mental disorders have numerous physical disorders such as heart attacks and strokes and obesity and diabetes we've long known that we we have also long known that they die early deaths um this is a way once and

for all to connect those dots and more importantly for us to be able to help people heal and recover yeah you brought up so many important issues in that answer right there because people will say well no mental illness is genetic or they will say no it's because of a neurotransmitter imbalance or they will say it's because of Prior trauma and all those three things are true to a degree they are all related but the question is how are they related and what impact do they have so would you argue the underlying theme to all

of those is mitochondrial function you know for some people this seems too hard to believe and I just want to share at least one kind of perspective of why it shouldn't be so hard to believe mitochondria are performing the task of metabolism which means they are performing the task of taking food and oxygen and turning it into energy and building blocks for cells metabolism is essential to life without metabolism we die that means a heart attack a stroke uh anything that stops metabolism stops life if you look up any poisons a poison that can kill

a human being in a matter of minutes or hours almost always without exception works at the level of mitochondria because mitochondria are essential to life they are essential to living organisms and the other parts of the machine the other parts of cells yes they can get damaged too but when they get damaged they don't result in immediate death damaging mitochondria does result in immediate death so in a way mitochondria are the most sensitive and necessary parts of cells to keep the cell functioning and so when there are problems with mitochondrial function there will be problems

in the way that cell functions it can become overactive it can become underactive and that's one of the critical paradoxes of the theory is that it can be either one and and but that helps us understand what would make the brain malfunction and why would different parts of the brain become overactive and why would other parts of the brain become under active and why does that abnormal activity Wax and Wane throughout the day why does stress make it worse why does sleep deprivation make it worse and this is a way for us to finally in

a coherent and coherent and cohesive way put the dots together and understand the biology now I do want to say this if you actually do a deep dive into the science of mitochondria and how exactly do they send all of these signals to the DNA and how exactly do they regulate the release of Serotonin and what exactly are they doing to turn inflammation on and off there is a tremendous amount we do not know this is an emerging field it's like opening a door into an entirely new universe and there's so much we have to

learn there's so much we need to know but regardless of that regardless of all the unknowns and all of the uncertainty this information this Insight allows transformation in the mental health field as you said there's so much still unknown which in a way is what can be frustrating for for clinicians you know say I don't have time for that wake me up when we know more can I kind of answer that yeah because clinicians are busy let's face it but all right so so let's transition to a second then about what we can do to

help our mitochondria and they're you know if you research that there's a laundry list of things that you find on the internet from omega-3 fatty acids to methylene blue to infrared light therapy to glutathione and they're all to ozone therapy right you can find something that says this one thing is is beneficial for your mitochondria now what we'll talk about sort of the more comprehensive lifestyle measures in the second but how do you respond or what are your recommendations when it comes to some of those sort of specific interventions that are recommended and have been

studied to a degree they have so at the end of the day all of the things that you just mentioned yes there is some research to suggest they may improve mitochondrial health but at the end of the day unfortunately solving metabolic or mitochondrial problems is usually not as simple as taking a supplement or applying red light to your scalp um or getting sunlight in the morning it those can be a part of a comprehensive treatment plan and I think for some people they can be a game changer even but I would venture to guess for

the majority of people they will not change the game without the common sense lifestyle strategies and the reason is because if you know so one clear mitochondrial toxin is alcohol and if somebody is a heavy alcoholic they are drinking a gallon of vodka every day throughout the day they are poisoning their mitochondria if that person then takes methylene blue to save his mitochondria it doesn't stand a chance against a gallon of vodka a day the gallon of vodka a day is a much more potent toxin to mitochondrial Health than anything methylene blue will be able

to reverse or ameliorate you need to think about comprehensive lifestyle strategies the good news is they're not rocket science they're things that most people already know and healthy diet good sleep some exercise or movement and other things yeah and I mean and that's an extreme example about the the Vodka that certainly happens but you could say the same thing for someone who's sleeping five hours a night and who's eating packaged Ultra processed you know nutrient poor foods and not exercising and the same thing and then they get the infrared light therapy and the the glutathione

and the methylene blue and that it may help a little bit but it's not it's not going to undo the damage or correct it yeah so when it comes to the specific lifetime lifestyle changes that can be beneficial obviously a big discussion from you from us from others is ketogenic therapy and not that that's the only way to do it but but what is unique about nutritional ketosis ketogenic therapies that is can uniquely impact mitochondrial health so in my mind you know we have a we have Decades of Neuroscience research looking at the effects of

the ketogenic diet on brain function it changes neurotransmitters and inflammation and uh the gut microbiome and all of those things are known to play a role in mental health and metabolic health um but in fact I think the money really is on mitochondrial health and so anything that mimics the fasting state so that could be fasting itself or a fasting mimicking diet such as the ketogenic diet um will stimulate two processes one is something called mitophagy which is getting rid of old and defective mitochondria and replacing them with new ones and the second is something

called mitochondrial biogenesis which is the production of more healthy mitochondria or hopefully healthy for people who have rare mitochondrial diseases where they have genetic abnormalities coding for proteins that make up their mitochondria mitochondrial biogenesis would not produce healthy mitochondria in those people they would probably replicate more unhealthy mitochondria but for the overwhelming majority of human beings on the planet stimulating mitochondrial biogenesis will stimulate the production of healthy mitochondria and it's those two things it's the process of getting rid of the old and defective mitochondria and replacing them with new ones and increasing the supply of

mitochondrion cells that I believe it's kind of the healing potential of the ketogenic diet in that if people do that over years a few years that they may actually experience long-term healing so that if they go off the diet they may not have a relapse of symptoms at least not right away so you said years now you know we hear reports of people starting a ketogenic diet and symptoms improving within days or within weeks within months but you said years now I know this is outside of research and sort of your what you think in

your clinical experience and what you know of of triangulating all the data why'd you pick years for long-lasting improvement so I shows years because of the evidence that we have in neurology with epilepsy is that when there's no doubt patients people can get relief of symptoms dramatic Improvement in symptoms and even full remission of symptoms within days or months and that's usually the goal and that's usually the expectation is within days or months people will be experiencing dramatic Improvement in symptoms so for symptoms of severe mental disorders like schizophrenia I usually tell people to give

the diet at least three months they usually do not I have not typically seen reduction in psychotic symptoms in days it usually takes many weeks or two or three months and sometimes even four months for some people so I encourage people to be patient longer but the reason I chose years for the long-term healing so is because epilepsy patients if they have a complete remission of epilepsy meaning seizures completely stop and they are seizure free on the ketogenic diet the standard recommendation right now is that those patients should remain on the ketogenic diet for anywhere

from two to five years and it's usually clinician discretion based on a lot of information about the patient's presentation and medications and long-standing history response to the diet and other factors so you're you're having a medical professional who's a specialist in epilepsy and ketogenic Therapies make an informed decision about how long you should stay on the diet but for most centers and most neurologists and epilepsy Specialists and dietitians working in that space it's two to five years and after two to five years they ask the patients to transition away from the ketogenic diet and they

jointly decide what kind of a diet is the person going to go back to hopefully not a junk food diet um but uh but they try to figure out what type of a diet will the patient transition to the majority of patients more than 50 percent of those patients will remain seizure free when they transition off the ketogenic diet now it's not a hundred percent there are patients with epilepsy who've been on ketogenic therapy for over 40 years because every time they stop the diet their seizures come back and there are some rare genetic disorders

that uh um glute 1 deficiency syndrome in particular that is a genetic disorder it is permanent and fixed and the primary therapy for that disorder is in fact the ketogenic diet and the ketogenic diet is a lifelong treatment for those people um there's no going back but uh but for most people like the famous Charlie of the Charlie Foundation he's no longer on a ketogenic diet and yet remains seizure free yeah it's very interesting uh parallel that if it's that way for epilepsy as best we know maybe it'll be that way for for mental illness

as well but but I also want to go back to what you said that you tell people to to be patient and stay on it for at least four months and I think that's important because the you know the things that grab the attention in social media is the person who you know had Decades of of psychosis resolve within two days of a ketogenic diet so everybody thinks it's going to be two days and I'm going to be completely healed but I think it's really important for you for for all of us to emphasize that

yes that does happen but that's on one end of the bell curve and the other end of the bell curve is that it could take months for symptoms to resolve which would go to the point of mitochondrial healing mitochondria aren't going to just heal overnight and that they'll take time which brings me to sort of another question of though digging into what does it take for mitochondria to help mitochondrial health and to help with this connection of metabolic and mental health because it's clear look if you're on a standard American junk food diet and you

improve your diet in any way some things are going to improve so we hear you know omega-3 fatty acids and and fatty fish are good for brain health blueberries and you know dark leafy greens and and phytonutrients are are good for brain health but the question always becomes is that enough like you will you'll likely get some benefit but is that going in your opinion in your opinion will that impact mitochondria will that start the healing process or does it truly have to be this metabox switch of ketosis to see the mitochondrial involvement and Improvement

I think it really depends on the person and the severity of their symptoms or the severity of their metabolic health so if a person is relatively healthy but has very mild anxiety and it there's no clear psychological or social reason for that anxiety so both the patient and clinician family members all think like no this is there's a problem here this isn't normal the person's normally not this anxious we don't know what's going on this doesn't even make sense there's nothing really in his life to bother him that much um that person may benefit if

that person is eating a lot of junk food a lot of Highly processed foods loaded with sugars and um uh other substances lots of man-made chemicals and you know ingredients that uh we probably don't even know the effect of um if that person cleans up his diet and goes with a more whole food type of a diet maybe something like a paleo-ish diet that includes some fatty fish and blueberries and other things that may be enough for that person and that person may have resolution of his anxiety symptoms for the patients with severe symptoms like

bipolar disorders schizophrenia severe chronic unrelenting depression that's maybe been present for years I think those people their brains are telling us that there is significant metabolic impairment um occurring and I think those people do need a more powerful intervention and again I just want to draw on this simple analogy um that is a really powerful analogy we use epilepsy treatments in Psychiatry all the time eating fatty fish does not stop seizures it doesn't I'm not saying it's not good for you sure it might be helpful sure it might improve some things but eating fatty fish

does not stop seizures yet ketogenic therapy does and so when we're talking about people with equally serious brain disorders like severe mental disorders we need to think along the same lines that ketogenic therapy is a unique and Powerful intervention um and uh and so I think for some people yeah cleaning up the diets just not enough yeah I think that's well said and at the same time a ketogenic diet may not be enough by itself either just like the analogy of the person drinking a gallon of vodka and the glutathione is not going to help

well the same thing the ketogenic diet isn't going to do everything so we mentioned toxins you've mentioned sleep as two very important parts of the whole metabolic treatment now what about exercise because we hear a lot about exercise and the benefits of exercise and what does it take you know get your 150 minutes per week and it's just the very generic recommendation or do we need high intensity interval training do we need resistance training if someone if someone really wants to sort of dial in their exercise it can be confusing like what do I need

to do for mental health for mitochondrial health and I know the research is spotty but how do you answer that question of what exercise recommendations to give where you're getting so so to speak the best bang for your buck so apprehensive treatment plan I think exercise is very powerful and um and if you really want to optimize your metabolic and mental health exercise should be part of your treatment plan um I think that two types of exercise that we have the most evidence for are exercises that builds muscle um and so that's usually can called

strength training or weight lifting or whatever and it doesn't doesn't have to be a lot you you're just you can use bands if you're not strong you can use a band you can just press against a table or a door you can do a wall push-up lots of things that you can do to build muscle if you're stronger than those types of interventions that you want to push yourself you want to try to build muscle not looking for Arnold Schwarzenegger level muscle um uh uh Arnold Schwarzenegger level muscle might actually be contraindicated uh if you're

if you're really trying to improve uh mental and metabolic health because it's hard to get to Arnold Schwarzenegger without some help if you know what I mean um and uh so but so resistance training and then the second type of exercise that I think we have the most evidence for is zone two cardio and um so zone two cardio would be you know 30 to 60 minutes maybe even a little longer if it's a weekend if you're gonna be a weekend warrior go for a run go for a bike ride something else but you're not

necessarily sprinting you're not necessarily doing high intensity intervals you're going at a pace where you can kinda sort of talk if you need to you're breathing a little bit heavier but not out of breath and that type of exercise is really working your mitochondria your mitochondria in your muscles are keeping your muscles going they are keeping your legs moving they are keeping your arms swinging and um and over time you're going to build up more mitochondrial Health in those muscles and shockingly the mitochondria in your muscles are then sending signals endocrine signals neuropeptides and other

things that reach the brain and that impact brain health now the one thing that I do want to say about exercise is exercise on its own is likely not enough of an intervention and there are some caveats to exercise that I just want people to know about they can actually interfere with the ability of exercise to help you improve your metabolic or mitochondrial health so we have an abundance of data that exercise alone does not typically help people lose weight so if you don't change their diet and just have them exercise it that in and

of itself typically does not result in any kind of meaningful weight loss and little or let alone sustained weight loss same is true for type 2 diabetes that exercising on its own without any dietary intervention or sleep intervention or anything else usually does not improve type 2 diabetes all that much on its own the the caveat is that you know we have one really well done study of middle-aged adults who were asked to exercise and half of them were given metformin and the other half were given a placebo pill the patients who got metformin actually

did not experience the same benefits in mitochondrial adaptations and metabolic adaptations or metabolic Health improvements they did not get the same benefits when they were taking metformin and that implies that metformin is somehow interfering with mitochondrial biogenesis or mitophagy if taken consistently and so there are many other medications that interfere with mitochondrial function some many I would say actually psychiatric medications some of them can enhance mitochondrial function but others impair mitochondrial function and so it's important to think through what medications am I taking we brought up alcohol but I'm going to include smoking cigarettes and

marijuana use that if you're trying to improve your mitochondrial Health through exercise all of those things certain medications um alcohol smoking marijuana they're all going to prevent you from getting the benefits that you should be getting that makes a lot of sense and and I don't mean to put you on the spot but now are you comfortable calling out one or two of the psychiatric medications that that do impair mitochondria health or mitochondrial biogenesis not saying that anybody should stop the medication not saying that it can't be effective for some psychiatric symptoms but what are

you know one or two of the the most glaring that affect mitochondrial health so the the glaring ones are many of the antipsychotic medications so we have long known that antipsychotic medications come with side effects and the side effects are typically lumped into the categories of metabolic side effects or neurological side effects and all of those can be understood through their toxicity on mitochondria so the antipsychotics can cause was weight gain and in some people it can be massive amounts of weight gain I have seen people gain a hundred pounds within six months of starting

antipsychotic medicines the antipsychotics can also cause type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes they worsen everything known for cardiovascular risk they can increase your blood pressure they can adversely increase lipids lower HDL raise triglycerides raise LDL they it can increase inflammatory biomarkers so all of the things that we don't want to do they are known to do this is not heresy it's right on the package inserts issued by the FDA so for some people those can impair progress or impair a metabolic treatment plan but as you said and I just have to reiterate stopping those medications can

be very difficult and very dangerous and it they it needs to be done safely and obviously you can probably tell by what I just said that I am a fan of helping people get off those medications in a safe manner so I'm not here to try to say just keep taking those medicines for the rest of your life and be a good patient and don't try to get better I'm not saying that but I am saying that if you take matters into your own hands and stop those medications on your own I have seen people

end up arrested I have seen people hospitalized and voluntarily and some people have died because they stop their medications on their own and so please don't do that because I know that it can be life-threatening and dangerous yeah and I think a Perfect Analogy is the you know the new glp-1 receptor Agonist medications for weight loss that you can take and lose weight and if you do nothing else with your lifestyle as soon as you stop the medication the weight comes back and more so so same with the antipsychotics if you just stop them without

putting other other lifestyle interventions or just other interventions in general in place to help you wean off it and do it under the guidance of clinical supervision the symptoms can come back and even worse so a similar analogy and have to be very very careful with that as you said so thank you for for the way you phrase that now now to wrap things up here I mean I I can't remember if this is in one of our interviews or just one of the many discussions we had it was clear your goal with brain energy

was to educate the individual about this connection between the metabolic and mental health the brain energy concept and what they can do about it and by Health measures you have absolutely succeeded whether it's by the popularity of your book the number of talks you've been asked to give and the number of podcasts you've been on the number of emails and lives you've touched and that is going to keep going I know that's not going to stop but what's next what do you think is the next step for you or the next step for this whole

sort of metabolic mental health movement that that you want to see happen you know in my mind I think the next step is we need to keep spreading the word I want to spread the word to clinicians and researchers I want more clinicians and more researchers to open their eyes to this science to take it seriously even if they're not going to begin implementing the treatments or doing research studies yet that's fine um change happens over time and and just awareness of new information is the start of change and so I want more and more

clinicians more and more people more families more patients to become aware that there's a different way out there there's a different way to think about mental illness and and to understand what might be happening in the brain and how to treat it um obviously I'm really excited about the clinical trials that are already going on that you metabolic mind and the bazooki brain research fund are are supporting through philanthropic support I'm very excited about all of that and I think that really all of that research holds so much potential to transform our field and open

even more eyes and get even more credibility for this work but the other thing that I'm really hopeful for right now mental illness is high still still to this day highly stigmatized it is underfunded treatment for mental disorders grossly underfunded I can't tell you how many people I know just looking for a traditional psychotherapist or psychiatrist to prescribe medication it can be next to impossible to find somebody who's taking new patients let alone who's good and you know children in emergency rooms are being warehoused in emergency rooms even though they are suicidal or psychotic because

they don't have any beds in psychiatric Adolescent Treatment units we have countless mentally ill people being warehoused in prisons homeless shelters on the street and so there is tremendous Injustice in my mind in the way that we treat people with mental illness and I actually think that this new way of understanding mental illness number one lets us know these are real physical disorders and yes psychological and social factors play a role in that but that doesn't make them any less physical and that means that they deserve medically necessary treatment and that this this new way

of understanding it opens up so many Pathways many that we've talked about dietary interventions but even some of the supplements that you were talking about methylene blue could that play a role for some people in some situations um red light therapy could that play a role for some yeah they probably could but we need clinicians and researchers exploring these options coming up with treatment algorithms how can we get the most people better the fastest because I actually believe we can start to manage the prison problem that we have and the homeless problem that we have

by actually effectively treating these people if we can fully restore their brain health they won't be in prison anymore they won't be homeless anymore they will be tax paying citizens living good lives and that's what we all want and the whole system benefits from that very well said well well thank you for those words thank you for all the work you're doing in the advocacy and you're certainly racking up your frequent flyer miles with all the conferences you're going to and I appreciate it and so um we look forward to hearing more from you here

at metabolic mind in the future thanks again thank you Brett for all you're doing