Metabolic Recovery from Mental Illness

Since 2019, I’ve been through the most physically and psychologically demanding experience of my life: tapering off five psychiatric medications I’d been on since my first manic episode in March of 2016. What made that process possible, and what ultimately changed the entire trajectory of my recovery, was not a new medication or a new therapy. It was food. Specifically, a ketogenic diet and a broader set of metabolic therapies that stabilised my brain in a way that nothing else had in five years of trying.

From 2016 to 2018, I had four hospitalisations for manic psychosis. Type 1 bipolar disorder. I was not sleeping for days at a time. I was having full-blown delusions. I was homeless for a period. I was on five medications at high doses and I still could not get stable, largely because of all the other lifestyle factors working against me. I was drinking, doing drugs, smoking, consuming massive amounts of caffeine, eating terribly, and getting almost no real exercise. The psychiatric medications were doing what they could, but the metabolic foundation of my life was broken. My brain was running on the wrong fuel, but I didn’t know that yet.

From 2018 to 2020, things improved on the surface. I was compliant with my medication, doing therapy, trying to sleep, even swimming regularly. But I was still not well. The pattern was consistent: I would start sleeping less and less—waking up at 6am, then 5am, then 4am—and I would recognise that pattern as the beginning of a manic spiral. To suppress it, I would take 15 or even 20 milligrams of olanzapine, a heavy sedative antipsychotic, just to knock myself back down. I did this over and over. I was managing, but I was not recovering.

During this same period, I began my first medication taper, attempting to get off benzodiazepines. I had been on Ativan, which has a short half-life and is particularly difficult to come off. The first step was a cross-taper to Valium, which has a longer half-life and is considered safer for a slow reduction. That cross-taper alone took one to two years to complete. Then came the actual taper off Valium, which was slow and painful and stretched over additional years. The entire benzodiazepine journey took roughly three years in total. The withdrawals were brutal. Debilitating is not an overstatement. For anyone who has been on benzodiazepines long-term and tried to come off, you know exactly what I mean. My nervous system didn’t let go easily.

I didn’t get fully off benzos until the autumn of 2021. But here’s where the story shifts. In June of 2021, my mum discovered the work of Dr. Chris Palmer, a metabolic psychiatrist at Harvard who treats serious mental illness using a ketogenic diet and other metabolic therapies. She came to me and told me about Dr. Palmer’s work, and I agreed to try it. We built a team, worked with Dr. Palmer and a dietitian, and on June 4, 2021, I started a ketogenic diet.

The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, moderate-protein, very low-carbohydrate diet. When you reduce carbohydrates to a low enough threshold, your liver begins producing ketones—an alternative fuel source that the brain can use in place of glucose. For many people with treatment-resistant psychiatric conditions, this shift in fuel appears to have a stabilising effect on brain energy metabolism. The hypothesis in metabolic psychiatry is that many psychiatric conditions involve impaired brain energy metabolism—essentially the brain struggling to use glucose efficiently—and that ketones can bypass that dysfunction and restore stability.

That is exactly what happened to me. Within months of starting the ketogenic diet, my manic episodes stopped. Not reduced. Stopped. I was waking up at 7:30 every morning, stable, sleeping through the night, functioning at a level I had not experienced in five years of illness. I had never shown that kind of prolonged mood stability in the entire course of my bipolar disorder—and on a lower dose of antipsychotic medication than I had ever been on before.

In the autumn of 2021, still on the ketogenic diet and in full ketosis, I finally took my last dose of benzodiazepine at an outdoor music festival in San Francisco. The withdrawals that followed lasted a month or two and then resolved. But nutritional ketosis made that final stretch significantly more manageable.

In 2022, I tapered my olanzapine from 5 milligrams down to 2.5 milligrams over the course of a couple of months. I had withdrawal symptoms. It was brutal. But my mood remained stable throughout, which told me the ketogenic diet was doing real structural work in my brain—not just serving as a lifestyle complement to my medications. I also got my first full-time job that year and held it for three and a half years. That would have been impossible during my illness.

In 2023, I tapered off lithium entirely, reducing from roughly 1,200 milligrams in six increments. In hindsight, the taper was slightly aggressive, but I didn’t experience withdrawal. My mood stayed stable. I travelled to Argentina for a month that year and worked remotely—something that would have been impossible when I was sick.

Then in 2024, I attempted to taper an anticonvulsant medication I had been on at a dose of 1,400 milligrams. My psychiatrist at the time reduced the dose by 200 milligrams, waited a couple of weeks, then reduced by another 200 milligrams. We came off 400 milligrams—roughly 30 percent of the total dose—but much too quickly. I suffered a protracted withdrawal injury that has taken two years to begin improving. Hundreds of nights of disrupted sleep. Nights where I was awake until 3am with my heart pounding. A genuine brain injury from a psychiatric medication taper that was too aggressive.

I survived the injury and continue to recover from it because of the metabolic foundation I have built. The ketogenic diet—which I transitioned to a full carnivore diet in October of 2025—kept my bipolar symptoms from returning even through one of the most neurologically destabilising experiences of my life. I eat only animal products: eggs, bacon, and butter at 1pm; steak, beef tallow, butter, and heavy cream at 6:30pm; sometimes only one meal a day, and beef liver once a week. The mental clarity and mood stability on carnivore have exceeded my expectations. Something shifted. My focus sharpened. My sleep improved. My energy stabilised in a way that felt almost physiological in its depth.

The full arc of the taper spans roughly seven years and involved coming off or lowering multiple medications, including a benzodiazepine, an antipsychotic, a mood stabiliser, and an anticonvulsant. I suffered a serious withdrawal injury and a period of prolonged neurological disruption. But I also discovered something remarkable: the brain is a metabolic organ, and what you eat determines which fuel the brain uses. For some people with serious psychiatric illness, shifting from glucose to ketones is not a lifestyle preference but a clinical intervention with real, measurable, life-altering consequences. That is what happened to me. And five years into a strict ketogenic and now carnivore diet, with no mood instability, no hospitalisations, and a stable and functional life, I have no doubt about what made the difference.