Mental Machinery The brain and other complex mechanisms of the human nervous system rely on 40 or so basic nutrients to run smoothly. The lack of any one—be it zinc or magnesium, chromium or folic acid—can cause a malfunction, leading to depression, irritability, or worse. |
That came to Hardy’s mind one November evening in 1995 when an acquaintance, Tony Stephan, began confiding his troubles. His wife, Deborah, had killed herself the year before after struggling with manic depression and losing her father to suicide. Now two of his 10 children seemed headed down the same road: Twenty-two-year-old Autumn was in a psychiatric hospital and 15-year-old Joseph had become angry and aggressive. He had been diagnosed as bipolar, a term for manic depression, but even with medication he was prone to outbursts so violent that the rest of the family feared for their lives.
The boy’s irritability sounded familiar to Hardy. I don’t know a whole lot about mental illness, Hardy told Stephan, but I’ve seen similar behavior in the hog barn, and it’s easy to cure.
So the two men set out to create a human version of Hardy’s pig formula. They bought bottles of vitamins and minerals from local health-food stores and spent nights at Stephan’s kitchen table concocting a mixture. On January 20, 1996, they gave Joseph the first bitter-tasting dose. Within a few days, Joseph felt better than he had in months. After 30 days, all the symptoms of his illness were gone.
Stephan next turned to Autumn, whose mental state had been steadily deteriorating for years. Now she was psychotic, convinced she had a gaping hole in her chest from which demons emerged. Just released from the hospital where she’d been on suicide watch, Autumn required 24-hour supervision to ensure she didn’t hurt either herself or her 3-year-old son.
Stephan forced her to take the nutritional formula. After just two days of treatment, her rapid swings between mania and depression stopped. After four days her hallucinations vanished. “I remember saying, ‘Oh my gosh, my hole is gone,’ ” she recalls. By week’s end, she felt well enough to quit all but one of her five medications.
Nine years later, both Autumn and Joseph remain symptom free, medication free, and devoted to taking what they call “the nutrients” each day. Autumn Stringam, her married name, is an articulate woman with bright eyes who revels in being a full-time mother to her son and the three daughters she’s had since getting well. “I don’t feel I’m cured,” she says. “I feel I’ve got something that allows me to manage and have a normal, functional life—maybe even better than functional.”
It’s easy to write off the Stephans’ treatment as just one more crackpot cure in a field rife with fraud and false hope. The supplement they took has yet to be proved in large clinical trials, while scientists who have studied it have been caught in the cross fire between converts, willing to take the supplement on faith and anecdotal evidence alone, and skeptics who look askance at all alternative medicine. Yet the idea of treating mental disorders with supplements makes sense, experts in the field say. Micronutrients help build and sustain the brain’s architecture and fuel its biochemistry. They are critical in countless ways to the working of cells throughout the body, including the brain. “We need 40 essential micronutrients in our diet—vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids,” says Bruce Ames, a biochemist at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute. Ames has explored the impact of zinc and iron on brain cells. “If you don’t have enough of one, you’re fouling up your biochemistry.”
A number of diseases caused by nutrient deficiency, such as scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, and pernicious anemia, display psychiatric symptoms like irritability and depression. But while severe deficiencies are rare in the developed world—when’s the last time you met someone with beriberi?—many of us fall short of getting all the nutrients we need. In 1997 a British study compared the mineral content of fruits and vegetables grown in the 1930s with the mineral content of produce grown in the 1980s. It found that several nutrients had dropped dramatically, including calcium (down nearly 30 percent), iron (down 32 percent), and magnesium (down 21 percent).
Some researchers suspect that even mild deficiencies can affect the psyche long before any physical symptoms appear. Stephen Schoenthaler, a sociologist at California State University at Stanislaus, has been exploring the link between nutrients and mental health by giving basic vitamin and mineral supplements to prison inmates and juvenile detainees. Again and again, since the early 1980s, Schoenthaler has found that when inmate nutrition improves, the number of fights, infractions, and other antisocial behavior drops by about 40 percent. In each case, he has found, the calmer atmosphere can be traced to the mellower moods of just a few hotheads. The inmates most likely to throw a punch, he has discovered, are the ones with the least nutritious diets and the lowest levels of critical nutrients.
Schoenthaler’s findings have been undermined by less than sterling research methods: His papers have failed to describe the precise methods by which he analyzed the inmates’ blood. (In January, a committee at his university recommended that he be suspended for a semester without pay for academic and scientific misconduct in later, unrelated research.) So in the late 1990s, an Oxford University physiologist named Bernard Gesch decided to put the theories to a more rigorous test. Gesch divided 231 prisoners in one of Britain’s toughest prisons into two groups. Half were given a standard vitamin and mineral supplement each day as well as fish-oil capsules and omega-6 oil from evening primrose. The other half received placebos. The results, published in 2002 in The British Journal of Psychiatry, drew headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. They were also almost identical to Schoenthaler’s. Over the course of approximately nine months, inmates taking supplements committed about 35 percent fewer antisocial acts than the group taking placebos. A few weeks after the study started, the prison warden told Gesch that the administrative report that month showed no violent incidents had occurred. “As far as he was aware, this had never happened in the history of the institution,” Gesch says.
Poor Man’s Pharmacopoeia
A number of common nutrients may help alleviate mental illness when taken in higher-than-normal doses. A few of the most promising candidates follow.
FOLIC ACID
Folic acid is a B vitamin essential to mood regulation and the development of the nervous system. Patients deficient in it appear to respond poorly to antidepressants. In one 2000 British study, 127 patients taking Prozac were also given either 500 micrograms of folic acid a day or a placebo. The folic acid group did significantly better, in particular the women, 94 percent of whom improved compared with 61 percent in the placebo group.
MAGNESIUM
It’s long been known that magnesium can act as a sedative. Some studies have also found magnesium deficiencies in patients with depression, although the evidence is inconsistent. The mineral may help other mood-stabilizing drugs work better. Researchers at the Chemical Abuse Centers in Boardman, Ohio, found that combining magnesium oxide with the drug verapamil helped control manic symptoms in patients better than a drug-placebo combination.
CHROMIUM
Several studies have suggested that chromium picolinate may help alleviate depression and improve the response to antidepressants. In one small trial at Duke University, 70 percent of the patients who were given chromium picolinate improved, while none of those given placebos got better.
INOSITOL
This sugar molecule appears to make the brain’s receptors more sensitive to serotonin, one of the chemical messengers that mediate mood. In a series of short-term placebo-controlled trials, researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel found that large doses of inositol—12 to 18 grams a day—helped alleviate depression, panic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
