How Food Affects Mental Health with Dr Christopher Palmer
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Welcome back to the Health Longevity Secrets show with your host, Dr. Robert Lufkin. His book titled Lies I Taught in Medical School is a New York Times bestseller. See the show notes for a link to download a free chapter. And now please enjoy this week's episode as we look at how food affects mental health with Dr. Chris Palmer.

Dr. Christopher Palmer is a friend and a regular guest on this program, and he never disappoints. This week, he takes us on a fascinating journey through the groundbreaking connection between metabolism and mental health, revealing how the foods we eat profoundly impact not just our bodies, but our minds.

As a Harvard psychiatrist and director of the Metabolic and Mental Health Program at McLean Hospital, Chris shares compelling evidence that many psychiatric conditions may fundamentally be disorders of brain energy. The conversation opens with alarming statistics about our growing mental health crisis, from quadrupling autism rates to skyrocketing depression and anxiety.

and connects these trends to parallel increases in metabolic diseases that we've talked about in this program, like diabetes and obesity. Chris explains how these seemingly separate epidemics share common biological roots in cellular energy production.

Most powerfully, Chris shares transformative case studies from his clinical practice, including a patient with treatment-resistant schizoaffective disorder whose hallucinations and delusions improved dramatically on a ketogenic diet.

Now, these experiences aren't isolated incidents, but rather reflect a growing body of research suggesting that ketogenic diets can beneficially alter brain chemistry by improving mitochondrial function, the cellular powerhouses responsible for energy production. The discussion extends beyond serious mental illness to everyday struggles that we all face, like burnout, anxiety, and depression.

An orthopedic surgeon contemplating early retirement due to severe burnout completely revitalized his passion for medicine through metabolic interventions, highlighting how energy deficits at the cellular level manifest as psychological symptoms that conventional treatments often fail to address.

Visit brainenergy.com to access free resources and take Dr. Palmer's self-assessment and learn more about the revolutionary field of metabolic psychiatry that's offering new hope to millions suffering from treatment-resistant mental health conditions.

Now, this episode is sponsored by Rio.Life, which emphasizes metabolically healthy food choices in their programs. I'm an advisor to Rio, but I only advise those companies that I believe in and would use for myself and for my family. This episode is brought to you by El Nutra, maker of the Prolonged Fasting Mimicking Diet. If you'd like to try it, use the link in the show notes for 20% off.

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And now, please enjoy this week's episode. Hey, Chris, welcome to the program. Thank you, Rob, for having me. It's so great to have you here. So let me get this straight. What you're saying is that what we eat and our metabolic health actually drives our mental health. And for some people, it can actually drive the psychiatric diseases they have.

Yes. It's certainly not in all cases. And mental health is a complicated thing, but there is no doubt that what we eat plays a role in our brain health and our brain health plays a role in our mental health. Right. Well, let's drill down and let's step back just a little bit. You're a psychiatrist, right? You deal with...

in some cases very sick, mentally ill people in hospitals on psychiatric medications. So what's the current state of mental illness? I mean, don't we have it taken care of? I mean, we have drugs, we have therapy. Isn't it under control? - The tragic reality is that mental illnesses are increasing across the globe, across a wide range of diagnostic categories.

For example, in the last 20 years, rates of autism have quadrupled in the United States. Rates of bipolar disorder have doubled in adults over the last 20 years. In children and adolescents, they're up exponentially. Rates of ADHD are up. And in fact, prescriptions for stimulant medications...

have doubled in the last 15 years in the United States alone, and rates of plain old bread and butter depression have reached an all-time ever recorded high, both in terms of current prevalence and lifetime prevalence, just last year in 2023. So we have a mental health crisis. We have an epidemic.

Many people cannot get adequate, appropriate mental health treatment. And the tragic reality is that for some people, even when they do get mental health treatment, it doesn't always work. Now, I'm the first to say mental health treatments do work for a lot of people. I think they save millions of lives every year. So I'm not here to bash mental health treatment, and I'm not here to try to take it away from anybody for whom it's working.

But far too many people are not getting better, even when they have access to the best of the best care. So we have a crisis and we need to do something about it.

So this mental health crisis, this increasing number of cases, it sounds very similar to what we've been hearing about other chronic diseases, things like diabetes, obesity, hypertension that are exploding as well. So what's going on in the world? It's really amazing here that the world is changing so fast here.

It is. And many people scratch their heads and they assume that mental illness has nothing to do with those other epidemics, that these are just for some unfortunate piece of bad luck. We are just having all of these independent, completely unrelated epidemics happening.

And what I'm here to argue is that it is time once and for all that we open our eyes to the century and decades of science. So we've got a century of clinical and epidemiological evidence, and we've got basic science research dating back to the 1930s, showing that people with mental disorders actually have metabolic problems in their brains and bodies.

And therefore, it is not a coincidence that as the rates of obesity and diabetes are skyrocketing in the population, the rates of mental illness will skyrocket as well. And we need to put it all together and come up with better treatment plans.

Great. I want to dive into that. Before I do, I want to just emphasize one interesting thing that I saw, that I read in your book that I wasn't aware of before. A lot of people in this program are interested in longevity and health span and lifespan. There

There's a correlation between longevity and mental illness. In other words, people with mental illness don't live as long as other people. So mental illness will actually shorten our longevity and certainly shorten our health span as well, correct? Yes.

Absolutely. So we have long known that people with serious mental illnesses die early deaths. And on average, they die anywhere from seven to 30 years early deaths, depending on what diagnosis, what population, what study you're looking at. But in fact, recent research in large population studies of over 6 million people find that

all of the mental illnesses, each and every one of them, ADHD, depression, anxiety disorders, all of them are associated with a shortened lifespan. On average, men are losing 10 years of life. Women are losing seven years of life.

What are these people dying of? The primary cause of death is heart attacks and strokes, but they are just occurring at a younger age. And when you look at the basic science research, whether you look at inflammatory biomarkers or telomere length or other things, we know that people with mental illness are aging prematurely. We know this, and we've got decades of science to support it. And once and for all, it's time we start doing something about it.

So let me emphasize that then. So people with mental illness die at higher rates than the regular population. They have shortened longevity. And it's not just because, well, people with mental illness sometimes commit suicide. It's not just that. But what you're saying is that they have increased rates of all these chronic diseases, heart attacks, strokes, etc.

cancer, the other chronic diseases that we're seeing. So there's some strange interplay going on there. And so what got you to begin thinking about a possible, you're one of the leaders in this

field of metabolic psychiatry, if not the leader. And how did you begin thinking about this? Or how did you come upon this idea? You know, the reality is, it was all serendipity. It started with

It started with my own personal experience over 20 years ago when I switched to a low-carb diet and noticed dramatic improvement in my own mental health.

And then within a few years, I start using this treatment, low-carb and ketogenic diets in patients with depression, anxiety, personality disorders. And I was sometimes seeing dramatic improvement in mood and energy, concentration, emotion regulation, self-injury, suicidality. All of these things were getting better.

for the most part i laid low with all of that because you know low carb keto diets are very controversial um some clinicians were losing their licenses or you know so i didn't want anything to do with any of that i just laid low thought you know i'm just gonna mind my own business help the people in front of me and then one of my long-standing patients with schizoaffective disorder

which is a cross between schizophrenia and bipolar. He asked for my help to lose weight. I helped him lose weight by using a ketogenic diet. And the quick version of the story is that within two months, his longstanding treatment-resistant hallucinations and delusions were getting better.

That man went on to experience dramatic improvement in both his mental health and his metabolic health. He was able to function in ways he had not been able to function since the time of his diagnosis. And that set me on a path to try to understand how on earth could a diet improve

treat such a serious brain condition like schizophrenia. That is impossible. And initially, that's what I thought. This is impossible. This cannot be happening. I must be imagining this. This doesn't happen in real life. And so when that happened, I went on a quest. I started using it in more and more patients. I was

finding similar results. I now have dozens of patients that I've personally treated who put their bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, chronic depression into remission, sometimes off medications. And so at that point, I knew I can't shut up about this anymore. I'm almost ethically bound to share this information, even if people laugh at me, even if people try to take my license away. I cannot keep this quiet. I have to talk about this

But I also recognized I'm not in this to try to just humiliate myself and go on about my life. I'm in this to try to help people. And in order to get other clinicians to take this seriously, I need to understand what on earth is happening. How can we make sense of a dietary intervention putting all of these different mental disorders into remission? And that led me on the path

to unravel this very complicated neuroscience, metabolic science. But when I put it all together, the soundbite that I came to is that brain disorders that we call mental disorders are in fact metabolic in nature.

And that once we understand that, not only does it open up treatment options like a low-carb or ketogenic diet, but it opens up numerous other treatment options. We can think about medications and using them in strategic ways. It raises cautions about some medications that we are currently using, but it also invites other metabolic therapies, exercise, stress reduction, supplements, vitamins, all sorts of possibilities. And I am really hopeful

This may, in fact, become the meaningful transformation of the mental health field that so many people are desperate for. Well, that's so important. As an aside, I thought you were going to say the sound bite was carbs made me crazy. No, it's not. It's much more complicated than that. Well, it is.

Well, amplifying that a little bit, the medications, like all medications, but medications for psychiatric illnesses have side effects. So there are problems there. So how do you balance the side effects of that versus the side effects of a ketogenic diet?

So, you know, it's really important because the first thing I have to say, just in order to be responsible, is that if anybody's listening to this and if you are taking psychiatric medications, please do not change them on your own. Please don't stop them.

It can be a disaster. I have seen people have life-threatening situations where they get depressed, manic, psychotic, suicidal. So please, please, please do not adjust your medications on your own. And yet this theory raises serious concerns about some of the medicines we are using because the medications can sometimes actually cause metabolic harm. They can cause obesity. They can cause diabetes. They can cause cancer.

increased risk for cardiovascular disease. And at least in the elderly, we know with certainty they cause premature mortality. And that is right on the package insert issued by the FDA. So as scary as all that sounds, everything that I just said is fully supported by the FDA. And it is right there on the warning labels of all of these antipsychotic medications. And

So in many ways, you know, if people get a good response to those medicines and they don't have many of those horrible side effects, I'm all for it. If somebody is taking these medicines and is living a good life and has stabilized their

mental illness, whatever type of mental illness it might be, if they are doing well, I don't want to stand in the way and I don't want to encourage them to even change their diet. Let's not fix what's not broken. So if you're doing well, that's great. But as I said earlier, millions of people, tens of millions of people are not doing well. They are taking their pills, they are going to therapy, they're not doing well.

And so ketogenic diet therapy, you know, interestingly is a last ditch effort for treatment resistant epilepsy. When all of the meds fail, when the brain surgery fails, then they try a diet. And the shocking thing is that that diet, the ketogenic diet can actually stop seizures, even when medications and surgery have failed to stop seizures.

And that's really important to me as a psychiatrist because we use epilepsy treatments such as epilepsy medications in tens of millions of people with mental health conditions. And so in many ways, using ketogenic diet is nothing new. And so just from that stance, somebody is not responding to current treatments. Maybe we should think about the ketogenic diet to see if it might help.

In terms of your bigger question that you started with, how do I think about that versus the medications? The great news is that instead of causing weight gain, the ketogenic diet can help people lose weight. Instead of causing diabetes, the ketogenic diet can sometimes reverse diabetes. Instead of causing increased risk for cardiovascular disease,

Unbeknownst to a lot of people, the ketogenic diet can actually lower your risk for cardiovascular disease. Even if it increases your LDL cholesterol, which is what everybody worries about and talks about,

the ketogenic diet can sometimes reverse hypertension reverse you know low hdl it can lower your triglycerides it can get rid of diabetes or at least improve your diabetes all of those are risk factors for heart attacks and so when you take them all together and plug them into the american college of cardiology kind of risk assessment for 10 years

Taken as a whole, even in the people who have increased LDL cholesterol, taken as a whole, risk for cardiovascular disease usually goes down on a ketogenic diet. So a ketogenic diet can not only help put illnesses into remission, it can improve both physical health and mental health at the same time.

We have reason to believe that this might help stave off neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease. And so I think it's a really exciting time in this field. And it's a really exciting time for human health because once and for all, we may have some new strategic tools that we can start using to help people improve their health now and possibly prevent really horrible, debilitating illnesses in the future.

Yeah, what you've just articulated, it's one of the things that's blowing me away too, that this strange diet, but arguably it may be, some people argue it's ancestrally how humans were meant to believe or evolve before the agricultural revolution. But this diet, this ketogenic diet that puts us into ketosis, as you said, it's

In many people, reverses hypertension, obesity, certainly. Type 2 diabetes, certainly. Cardiovascular disease, of course. Cancer, it's now ketogenic diets are now being used for medicine.

gliomas and other type of brain tumors and other types of cancer treatments, in addition to the other therapies. And as you say, Alzheimer's, you know, the ketogenic diets are dramatically effective in some cases with those patients. So, I mean,

What is it about, I mean, and one other point with the diabetics, similar to what you said, I'm hearing the same things. In other words, the type 2 diabetics are put on insulin to control their glucose fluctuations and save their lives. But a lifetime of insulin drives insulin resistance, inflammation, and ultimately,

makes their lives shorter because of heart disease and drives the complications of that, whereas this ketogenic diet doesn't seem to do that. So what is it about the ketogenic diet that has an effect on all these diseases, all these chronic diseases? Is it mTOR? Are we turning a metabolic switch off? How do you conceptualize it?

kind of above and beyond psychiatry or even in psychiatry. What's the magic of this particular diet? So the real answer is that it's a really important question, one that researchers have been studying for decades actually. And so for people who don't know, we actually know a tremendous amount about this diet. And yet the answer to that question is still somewhat controversial.

because different people like different mechanisms of action. The reality is all these mechanisms of action are likely interrelated. And so it's not just one thing. The human body is an interconnected system. And if you change one thing in the brain, you might change some things in your heart or pancreas or liver or gut and other things. So it's not that these things are disconnected. But

But we know that the ketogenic diet is changing neurotransmitters. It's improving insulin signaling and glucose regulation. It's decreasing inflammation. It changes the gut microbiome in beneficial ways. And there's this whole gut-brain connection. It changes gene expression. As you said, mTOR, autophagy.

The thing that I am particularly focused on that I think actually helps us unify some of that and better understand some of that is that the ketogenic diet is a central kind of

and powerful way to improve mitochondrial biology. And it actually ends up doing two primary things for mitochondria. One is that it stimulates a process called mitophagy, which is getting rid of old and defective mitochondria and replacing them with new ones.

But the second is that it stimulates a process called mitochondrial biogenesis, where cells are producing more mitochondria. So that after doing a ketogenic diet for a few months or a few years, the cells in our brains and bodies will often have more mitochondria and those mitochondria will be healthier.

And for people who are really interested in aging and the diseases of aging, such as obesity, cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and mental disorders,

The people who are interested in that, we can actually begin to understand many of those illnesses, at least through a specific lens of mitochondrial biology. And mitochondria can help us understand neurotransmitter dysregulation, hormone dysregulation, inflammation dysregulation. It can also help us understand how inflammation and these other things can affect mitochondrial function. So it becomes a vicious cycle.

Again, I don't mean to make it simple. It's not simple. It's ridiculously complicated. And yet, based on today's science, we can paint an outline of this complex scientific picture, and it immediately points us to strategies that we can start using today to help people. And that is the power of science, and that's the power of understanding and knowledge.

And so with your patients, let me be clear, when they go on this diet, this ketogenic diet, it's not like they go on it for two weeks and then they're done. This is, it's almost not a diet. It's basically a lifestyle shift that they adopt this for the rest of their lives, right? Is that right? Or no? Or do they just go on for a period of time?

So that's, you know, in the mental health field, that's one of the biggest unknowns right now.

And because we just don't have enough long-term data in people with serious mental illnesses to know. I think for people with mild mental illnesses, they probably can go on it for a few months or a few years. People who have mild burnout or anxiety or depression, they might be able to do a reset in a few months and then move to, they probably can't go back to the diet

that got them into trouble, but they might be able to transition to a different type of a diet, like a paleo diet or something else where maybe they're not in ketosis anymore, but they're still eating real whole foods and a nutritious diet with all of the nutrients that they need. For people with serious brain disorders, the best data that we've got is from the epilepsy field because this is a 100-year-old treatment for epilepsy. And on average...

Most of the people who get significant benefits from the ketogenic diet do not need to do it for life. They actually do it for anywhere from two to five years. So it's not a short intervention. It's two to five years on a ketogenic diet.

And a lot of those people, again, not all of them, some of them do have to do it for life to keep their seizures away, but some of them can stop it within two to five years and maintain all of the benefits.

And what we think is probably happening is what I was describing. These changes in insulin signaling, the changes in mitochondrial biology, cells are repairing themselves. And it's almost like doing a reset and repair process for brain cells that make it so that if a person goes off the diet, they actually, the seizures don't come back. The mental disorders don't come back.

As I said, right now, we don't have enough data in large numbers of people. So it's premature for me to speculate on whether the ketogenic diet may, in fact, it might need to be a lifetime treatment. It might be a shorter term treatment, like two to five years. I already have good evidence just from my clinical practice and from the early research studies that are getting done

that doing it for less than a year is not enough. That when people do the diet, oftentimes they'll get benefits within weeks or months. But if they go off the diet within that first year, the symptoms often come back. And one year is just not enough time on the diet. So, yeah. Yeah.

I want to go back to one thing you hinted at there that I thought that you mentioned the possible benefit of a ketogenic diet in sort of non-clinical mental health issues or sort of like, you know,

our own day-to-day mild depression, our mild anxiety, dealing with our spouses, our children, our coworkers, all those things. And what you're saying is the ketogenic diet might help that as well? Absolutely. I mean, I can share one telling clinical case. An orthopedic surgeon read my book

He was actually highly burned out. He had been planning, he's a young guy, but had been planning to retire from orthopedic surgery for a couple of years. He was just increasingly burned out, increasingly frustrated with his practice, with medicine, with the whole medical field. Couldn't take it anymore, just hated his life and really thought just stopping his practice was the right answer.

He read my book, he implemented some changes which included a low carbohydrate ketogenic diet, and he also implemented exercise and improving his sleep. He prioritized sleep and prioritized a little more exercise than he had been getting. Those three interventions transformed his life. And he said everything got better.

And all of a sudden, I found myself loving orthopedic surgery again. I love my career. I love what I do. I love helping people. I love this field. What on earth was I thinking? That would have been a tragic mistake for me to retire early from this field. And he is now thriving again.

He is doing phenomenally well. And so, yeah, and he was probably never diagnosed with a quote unquote mental illness. He just had another epidemic thing that we call burnout. So many Americans are burned out. They are just exhausted, demoralized, barely getting through day by day.

And these changes, again, can improve brain function. Burnout is not a normal state of affairs. Burnout suggests that you have a metabolic problem likely affecting your brain and your body. And it really does, literally, because metabolism produces energy.

A metabolic problem means some of the cells in your brain or body don't have enough energy. Burnout is literally an energy problem. Your brain or body don't have enough energy. And that is exactly the way people feel. They feel like they don't have enough energy.

And there's science to support that feeling. And there is science to help people improve that so that they can become vibrant, thriving humans again.

Wow, that's such a beautiful story of returning passion and giving this man his life back, really, of what he wants. And it's totally appropriate that your book is entitled Brain Energy. It makes a lot of sense there. I wonder what, I mean, given all the benefits of this approach, what

What kind of pushback are you getting? Why isn't everybody embracing this for at least the psychiatric conditions? If you're a patient who's not responding to therapy or what sort of pushback are you having about this metabolic approach in your experience? So I'm going to start with the success and then I'll tell you about the pushback. The great news is that we...

World-renowned neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and other researchers are embracing this. They recognize, again, this isn't new. This is about integrating decades and decades of neuroscience, mental health science, all

All of the research we've been doing, all of the signs point to these are metabolic conditions. And so I think those scientists are extraordinarily excited and passionate. Many of them have known for decades that

They knew that there was a mitochondrial problem or a metabolic problem, but what they didn't know is what can we do about it? They didn't understand what on earth can we do to fix this. And in fact, I would argue that the ketogenic diet is probably...

one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful tool that we have available today in 2024 to improve mitochondrial and metabolic health.

Yes, biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies are working on new drugs that will be sold, new supplements that will be sold. And I welcome those. I really do. I welcome all of the tools that we can get to help people improve their health. So these scientists are extraordinarily excited.

We've got at least, I think, 15 trials underway of the ketogenic diet for mental illnesses. We've got other trials. I have been in touch with biotech companies and supplement companies that are developing ketone supplements and MCT oil supplements and molecules like urolithin A and R.

other products that are all targeting mitochondrial biology. And these companies are extraordinarily excited about the possibility of improving human health, improving diabetes management, improving or reducing cardiovascular risk, helping people prevent and or treat Alzheimer's disease. And I think

In particular, because of my work, they are increasingly excited about the possibility that, wow, this might actually help a lot of people with these mental health conditions as well. So that's the exciting news. And that is happening. This field is exploding. Back to the question, how much pushback am I getting? What are the reservations? The reality is most mental health clinicians have never heard of any of this.

They don't know anything about mitochondria. They don't know anything about metabolism. They don't know much at all about neuroscience. They don't know what the field has been doing. They are just clinicians trying to help the people in front of them. And so when they first hear about this, especially if it's from a non-scientist, if they just hear, oh, the keto diet can treat bipolar, for good reason, they are going to be skeptical and they should be skeptical.

Because the reality is our field has been plagued by snake oil salesmen for millennia. Everybody's got something for mental illness. It might be bleeding with leeches. It might be, you know, shock treatment. It might be phrenology. You know, the bumps on your head have something to do. Oh, it's the way your mother treated you. That's why you have schizophrenia. It...

Our field has been plagued by ridiculous assertions that actually took off a lot. They never panned out. And in some cases, they actually harmed people. They certainly offered false hope and false promises. And so mental health professionals are right to be protective of the patients that we serve.

They do have, I would even argue, an ethical obligation to protect the patients that we serve. The people we serve are vulnerable. They are desperate to get better, and we need to protect them from snake oil salesmen. Again, the great news, we have world-renowned scientists and neuropsychiatrists saying, wait, guys, this isn't snake oil. There's something to it.

We have real life clinical human trial data to call upon, epilepsy literature, diabetes literature, weight loss literature. We have over 100 randomized controlled trials documenting that the ketogenic diet is safe and effective for weight loss, for type 2 diabetes management, and for seizures.

And those are real things that we can employ in the mental health field today. We don't need more randomized controlled trials to begin thinking about using these interventions in real human beings suffering today. I welcome the randomized controlled trials because if we get enough of them, at some point, ketogenic therapies might become a first line or a second line treatment for something like schizophrenia or bipolar or treatment-resistant depression.

But right now, we can certainly use them as a third or fourth line treatment in patients with treatment-resistant illness, the ones who have failed the treatments that we're offering. We can absolutely use it. And we have a tremendous evidence base to support us. So I think that's where we're at. I'm really excited. I recognize we've got an uphill battle. We've got millions of clinicians to educate.

Millions of clinicians don't know anything about this. The patients they are serving deserve to know about this. The patients they are treating who have treatment-resistant mental illness deserve access to this treatment or at least access to the option of this treatment. So we've got a gargantuan task ahead of us.

Well, your book, Brain Energy, is a remarkable success and deservedly so. It's transformed my thinking about mental health. Thank you so much. And the book, it's accessible not only to professionals, but I would recommend it for a general audience also, anyone if you want to understand this area. And writing on the success of your book, you're getting access to tremendous resources now and online.

all sorts of possibilities. What do you see in the future? What would you like to do? What would you like to accomplish in the next couple of years around this? - So the great news is that I just got a significant philanthropic gift to start a new metabolic and mental health program, the McLean Hospital.

I don't say this to brag, but we are currently the number one ranked psychiatric hospital in the nation. I say that with pride that I am working at the number one ranked psychiatric hospital and we are starting the world's first metabolic and mental health program that will serve patients, that will offer these treatments to patients. We will be pursuing research. We will be pursuing randomized controlled trials. We are about to embark on...

trial of the ketogenic diet for schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder. So if you know somebody who's in the Boston area and interested in participating, let us know. I'm also hoping to work on developing clinical services to treat more and more people. I am hearing from thousands of people asking for help, asking for access to these treatments.

So working on that. And then finally, I'm working with a team of volunteers and philanthropists on advocacy. We have so much work to do, so much education to do and advocacy. The mental health field is a mess. Getting access to just traditional mental health services is sometimes next to impossible. People have to pay out of pocket. Insurance companies don't reimburse. There are so many problems. And I...

I am focused. I am laser focused on one mission, to improve the treatments and the lives of people with mental illness. They deserve better than what we are giving them. And I want to improve the treatments we offer them. And I want to improve their lives. Wow. Well, your book, Brain Energy, is available everywhere. How can people follow you, Chris, on social media or your website? Maybe you could tell them that now.

So people can find more information about all of this at brainenergy.com. That's a website. We've got tons of free resources, a self-assessment, lots of podcasts and articles that I've done, all available for free.

You can learn more. We've got articles coming out. We've got a newsletter. So yeah, I hope that people will stay informed and maybe even become advocates to transform the mental health field and stand up for people with mental illness. Great. Well, thanks so much, Chris. This has been a blast talking with you. And thanks so much for the wonderful work you're doing. Thank you, Rob, for having me and for a great conversation.

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