Schizophrenia and gluten

BEYOND THE GUT: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GLUTEN, PSYCHOSIS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

May 16, 2018Gluten, Psychosis, Schizophrenia

JAMES GREENBLATT, MD & DESIREE DELANE, MS

INTRODUCTION

The National Institutes for Mental Health provide a succinct definition for schizophrenia as periods of psychosis characterized by disturbances in thought and perception and disconnections from reality; however, diagnosis is much less straightforward.  Schizophrenia represents a wide illness spectrum with symptomatic features and severity ranging from odd behavior to paranoia.  With a prevalence rate over the past century holding steady at 1% worldwide and immovably poor patient outcomes, schizophrenia delivers profound relational and societal burdens, proving to be a complex clinical challenge and an unyielding epidemiological obstacle.

GLUTEN AS A TRIGGER FOR PSYCHOSIS

Although the role of food hypersensitivities in disease pathologies is highly controversial in the medical community, many recognize a parallel rise with dietary evolution in modern history.  Major shifts from ancestral diets largely absent of wheat or dairy to one with these as foundational components generate reasonable arguments on their implications for human health.  Industrialized food systems that streamline the way foods are grown, processed, and stored are often charged with altering their very nature down to its most infinitesimal molecules.  Yet, despite their diminutive size, micronutrients from food are essential to the complex processes and interactions that represent optimal health.

Intolerance to gluten represents one of the most prominent food hypersensitivities arising in recent history, delivering profound impacts to both physical and mental health.  As the most severe reaction to gluten, Celiac Disease (CD) affects a growing population of men and women READ MORE

My guest post at Virgil Stucker and Associates

Mothers, Fathers, and Others

May 15, 2019

Guest post: Rossa Forbes

I’ve been doing all right when it comes to being a supportive mom of an adult son with a schizophrenia diagnosis. I am his life coach, his cheerleader, and his 24/7 shrink. Outside of the home, I try to put a positive face on schizophrenia because I

believe it needs an image make-over and also because I do see a lot of positives in a condition when the world all around me often doesn’t.

I regularly remind myself that in order for someone to gain this label they’ve got to be a pretty thoughtful and generous person to begin with, okay, maybe a tad too thoughtful and a tad too generous to survive in sales, probably too religiously obsessed to even qualify as a preacher, too philosophical and/or poetic to ever work at being a philosopher or a poet, and too generous with their possessions to ever accumulate much in the way of worldly goods. What a wonderful human being my son with all of these traits is.

There’s another aging side of me that increasingly lacked the energy to keep up this degree of cheerful commitment to my son. He’d been living at home  READ MORE

Too much going on now to write about properly

Since Ian retired at the end of March and arrived home in Florida a couple of weeks ago after eight months away, I’ve had my hands full adjusting to our new retired normal. Thankfully, Chris is out of the house and living on his own so there is one less personality to deal with on a daily basis. (Insert emoji smiley face.) The last few weeks have been days filled with administrative tasks involved in “hubby’s” transition from work to retirement. He’s making “helpful” suggestions to add to my growing to-do list. Grrr. He wants everything done now!

Tomorrow afternoon we’ll get the results of Chris’s second brain mapping at the neurofeedback center. We’ll find out what has changed after his undergoing twenty neurofeedback sessions.

Did I tell you that Chris has also been sleeping under a weighted blanket for the past few weeks? He loves it! I got the idea from an article that Ian sent me about a woman who mistakenly purchased a weighted blanket on Amazon, and slept through the night for the first time in a long time. These blankets have been used in the autism community for years. Amongst other things the blankets stimulate the release of serotonin to alleviate the effects of many anxiety related conditions. He does seem less anxious. Is this the effect of the neurofeedback? Or is it because he’s more and more on his own and no longer being nagged at by me? Or is it that he’s back on 1 ml of Abilify?

I may have fixed my A-fib using natural methods. I won’t say anything more about this until after my appointment with the electrophysiologist later this month. I seem to have gotten my heart rate under control, but will need ECG results to know if the heart rate variability has improved. Too soon to cry victory.