Autoimmune Disease Or Mental Illness? Schizophrenia Symptoms Vanish After Chemo Treatment
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“For decades, a woman named Mary suffered from consuming delusions. Long-lost professional colleagues were meddling with her life; someone was spying on her through a camera in the showerhead; her eldest daughter was conspiring against her and putting poison on her pizza. She took to barricading herself inside her house, and would spend years in and out of psychiatric inpatient care. And then, suddenly, just months after beginning chemotherapy treatment for lymphoma, her symptoms of psychosis disappeared.”
That’s how New Yorker editor David Remnick introduces the story of Mary’s illness “and astonishing recovery.” Writer Rachel Aviv, he says, “investigates a relatively new phenomenon: researchers and physicians are beginning to ask how many patients who present with what are typically considered psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, may actually be suffering from autoimmune conditions.”
One scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, he said, “tells Aviv that the figure may be between one and five percent of schizophrenia patients. ‘Even one percent ends up being almost a million people in the world who should be treated with a different kind of medicine,’” he concluded.
The idea that schizophrenia might, in some cases, be linked to the intersection of mental illness and autoimmune disease reminds us of our recent story: “Can a Ketogenic Diet Actually Treat Mental Illness?” In the piece, writer Gordy Slack explores the possibility that in some cases, psychotic disorders may have metabolic causes – making them treatable as such.
A growing body of scientific evidence suggests the ketogenic diet, long used to treat epilepsy, could be effective for treating schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders and reducing the often debilitating side effects of antipsychotics.
Both stories explore a tantalizing new possibility for patients and their families: what appear to be intractable mental disorders might, in some cases, have treatable underlying causes.
The name “MindSite News” is used with the express permission of Mindsight Institute, an educational organization offering online learning and in-person workshops in the field of mental health and wellbeing. MindSite News and Mindsight Institute are separate, unaffiliated entities that are aligned in making science accessible and promoting mental health globally.
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