A plea to mental health professionals to learn the basics of Metabolic Psychiatry for patient advocacy

If you are a psychologist, neurologist, psychiatrist, mental health counselor, marriage and family therapist, or social worker (and maybe just any old kind of RN or MD) it is time to learn about the field of metabolic psychiatry.

It's a real thing. The research is behind it. And if you don't know about it and cannot inform your patient of it as an option to recover from their mood disorder, neurological disorder, or substance use disorder, you are doing them a HUGE disservice.

And being a Licensed Mental Health Counselor myself, I know that we are not the type to not want to know all the ways we can help our clients feel better.

I am writing this article because our access as mental health professionals to this topic is limited or non-existent. And that's unfair. We are the ones on the front lines treating patients using psychotherapy. We are the ones sitting with these clients in distress, desperate to feel better and willing to do anything to get there. And here we are, not even informed of the existence of this type of therapy!

How is Metabolic Psychiatry not offered as continuing education credits yet by the American Psychological Association , American Psychiatric Association , or the American Counseling Association ? When we try to go near this topic from a Nutritional Psychiatry standpoint in our training by taking offered CEUs for therapists from available training outlets, we are quite frankly getting outdated, food-industry-focused information that is not based on actual nutritional biochemistry.

I know. I have taken some of these CEUs. I have been super disappointed. The information is so bad or outdated that I have even complained!

If you want to understand the theory and the science behind Metabolic Psychiatry, there is no better option than this book. It is painstakingly researched, pulling together DECADES of information from the scientific literature, sharing published case studies of the most severe mental illness being treated in this way, and providing a vision for the future of its use by mental health practitioners.

Here is an audiobook version. Listen to it on your way to work. But for goodness' sake, listen to it.

Because if you are like me, you really want your clients to get better. And so often, we know that we are helping our clients (or really trying to), but the help we offer is insufficient for the level of change and thriving we want for them. The bottom line is it is hard to do successful therapy with a brain that is on fire with neuroinflammation, or that is low on energy. We know these conditions fuel neurotransmitter imbalances and skyrocket oxidative stress. And we all know that there are no medications that successfully fix those conditions that do not cause side effects that are really, REALLY hard for our clients to live with. And often, they just don't work for very long.

Our goal with clients is psychological health. And our clients cannot get there without BRAIN HEALTH. I don't care how hard you "therapy" them.

And I know we were taught to "stay in our lane" and not give nutritional advice, but this is different. We can talk about metabolic psychiatry as a field and option. We can talk about it just like we are trained to talk to our clients about medication as an option or adjunct to psychotherapy. You can absolutely become knowledgeable enough to offer this as an option for clients to investigate and find help in implementing. You can use your wonderful psychotherapy skills to help them seek out its implementation and make the lifestyle changes necessary to utilize it! Your clients need you so much to get better. And they need you so much to advocate for them and help them learn all the ways they can feel better.

Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, TBI, MCI, Dementia, Bipolar, Schizophrenia, and even some Eating Disorders. These are just a few of the disorders we see either go into complete remission or exponentially improve using Metabolic Psychiatry principles.

Let's explore together how the field of Metabolic Psychiatry can help our clients. There is no better advocacy than to update our knowledge of all the ways they can feel better!

Please share this article where other practitioners will see it. Share with other mental health professionals, on your timeline, in groups, and in places where patient advocacy happens. Got a group practice? Create metabolic psychiatry training for your practitioners. Find someone who practices it and bring them in for a talk or presentation.

If after learning about Metabolic Psychiatry you decide it is something you wish to be trained in, you can find that training with the following programs.

But don't feel like you have to do this to put it on your client's radar as a potential treatment. They just need a cooperative prescriber willing to adjust medications appropriately and some kind of access to a knowledgeable ketogenic diet professional. This can be any professional with appropriate training and does not have to be a nutritionist.

Even online programs exist to help patients with this type of treatment option.

I know because I run one that is focused on general neurological symptoms, including but not limited to what clients identify as brain fog.

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