Delusional or Deficient?

WARNING: The below post is just my theory of the potential causes of mental illness based on the limited research I have done. If you suffer from any diagnosed mental health condition please speak to your health professional before acting on anything you have read in this post.

I’ve been reading a lot about the hormone dopamine recently and its role in mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder and have come to the conclusion that it may be possible to alleviate or even cure altogether these illnesses with changes in diet and lifestyle or that mental illness may simply be the result of an underlying physical health condition or hormonal imbalance that could be treated without the use of powerful antipsychotics.

Firstly I would state that I am convinced that dopamine, it’s excess or deficiency in the body is the cause of these illnesses having been placed on way too high a dose of antipsychotic medication for a couple of years.

I also believe that dopamine may be a far more important hormone in the overall functioning of the body than currently seems to be considered.

I’ll go into more detail and try to back up my argument with science.

I first started with where in the body dopamine is synthesised, it seems obvious that if you have too much or too little the body is either producing too much or too little and I found two key areas: the gut and the kidneys or adrenal glands.

Dopamine and the kidney – PubMed

Role of Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis in Regulating Dopaminergic Signaling – PMC

Knowing about seasonal affective disorder and the fact that this can be treated with sunshine and hence vitamin D I wondered whether bipolar disorder is also a seasonal illness and it appears that it often is.

Bipolar Disorder Changes in Winter and Summer

Then I wondered about vitamin D and what parts of the body it is produced in, and once again I found the adrenals via the liver, the adrenals are also where dopamine is synthesised.

Vitamin D – Health Professional Fact Sheet

Vitamin D: A potent regulator of dopaminergic neuron differentiation and function – PubMed

And then I started thinking is schizophrenia just a different presentation of these illnesses, the symptoms of bipolar and schizophrenia are so similar that they may just be two presentations of the same imbalance in my opinion. Even seasonal affective disorder and psychotic depression are on this spectrum.

So to make a brief conclusion, it seems possible that poor diet and nutrition and vitamin D and possibly a poorly functioning liver or kidneys may be behind the diagnoses of the most commonly recognised mental health conditions.

In my next post I’ll go into what I think could help in terms of diet and lifestyle, not just eating healthily and living well, but eating the correct foods at the right time of year.

Robert David Jackson