Harvard Psychiatrist: THIS Food Is Causing The Mental Health Crisis! - Chris Palmer

**Chris Palmer** (0:00)
If a woman has obesity and diabetes, she has quadruple the risk of having an autistic child. But I want to go deeper, and most people don't know this. Something horrible has happened.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:14)
Dr. Chris Palmer, the Harvard psychiatrist whose groundbreaking new research could be the missing piece to cure the mental health epidemic.

**Chris Palmer** (0:22)
Mental disorders are the leading cause of disease and disability worldwide. Governments are actually labeling them as ‎herminal illnesses and to allow people to die by assisted suicide. And they're going to allow them to die because they know what I'm saying is true. They know that our treatments fail people year after year after year. And what I'm here to say is, you can in fact get better. How? I struggled with mental illness myself for 20 years. I tried to kill myself several times. There was no hope for me whatsoever.
And I was furious with the mental health field for being so incompetent. And I wanted to try to help. And the thing that people have not opened their eyes to is the science of metabolic health. And that there's tiny things in our cells that can heal and recover people who have had chronic, horrible mental illnesses.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:18)
Really?

**Chris Palmer** (1:18)
Yes. And if autism is genetic, it shouldn't quadruple in 20 years. These are facts, and we can do something about it today. But the easiest way to understand it is that...

**Steven Bartlett** (1:37)
Chris, when you speak, before we started recording, you speak with a deep, authentic sense of mission, and that underneath there is a personal driver that is unimitatable, and that is getting you out of bed every day. because I could see it in your eyes. I could see it in the way that you said the words that you said to me. Where does that drive begin for you? What was the catalyst moment in your life that inspired you and gave you that fire that seems to be unquenchable to pursue the path that you've pursued?

**Chris Palmer** (2:13)
I struggled with mental illness myself, starting in childhood. Nobody recognized it, nobody diagnosed it. I didn't know what it was. Nobody knew what it was. I just knew I was different and somehow ostracized for who I was, and it just felt like part of who I am. And then a series of horrible tragic events happened in my extended family when I was about 12 years old. And my mother ended up having a nervous breakdown. She called it a nervous breakdown. It started with what we would call major depression, and quickly escalated to depression with suicidality. And then she developed psychotic symptoms. She became very delusional. She got mental health treatment, but the treatment didn't work. They basically were just kind of in my 12-year-old mind. The psychiatrists were just drugging her. And those drugs weren't making her symptoms better. They weren't restoring her health. She went on to live the rest of her life with a chronic psychotic disorder. And that disorder completely ruined and devastated her life in so many ways. She lost everything. She lost custody of her eight kids. She lost all of her money, everything. The courts didn't give her any support or any money. I had my own struggles, even worse with mental illness after all of that. I ended up leaving home before I finished high school. I had chronic depression and suicidality and OCD and other things. And the mental health field was worthless for me and probably caused a lot of harm for me.
And so at the end of the day, the reason I'm a psychiatrist is because I recognize how horrible and devastating mental illness can be. And I came to the field really angry with the mental health field for being so incompetent. And I wanted to try to help. I wanted to try to maybe contribute to better solutions for people.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:49)
My futile attempts to save you from the ravages of mental illness lit a fire in me that burns to this day. I'm sorry I didn't figure this out in time to help you. May you rest in peace.

**Chris Palmer** (5:04)
That's my mom, and that's the dedication of the book. Her story and the devastation to her life is the thing that drives me to this day.
And I just know that there are hundreds of millions of people just like her with different diagnoses with different symptoms. But the devastation to their lives is the same. And those people deserve better. And I want to help them. I want to get them better treatment.

**Steven Bartlett** (5:45)
Those people, those people exist on some kind of, I guess, multiple different spectrums of disorder. What are those spectrums of disorders? And what are those disorders that you're referring to when you say those people are the people that I want to help?