My incredible story of an incurable mental illness and how I got well and got my life back

Today marks seven months since I managed to heal from an incurable mental illness and get my life back.

I have an incredible story to share with you, a story of bipolar disorder and psychosis with years of ineffective treatment, and a simple cure that got me completely well in a matter of days, and has allowed me to stay well and get on with my life.

I hope that by sharing my experience others may come forward and find that they also have the same condition, because I am not unique; there will be many other people suffering at the hands of  psychiatrists and taking dangerous quantities of mind altering medication with little or no positive effect, who could transform their lives for the better by following a strict, yet very healthy eating regime. A diet that can switch off the autoimmunity that is making them sick, and repair the neurotransmitter metabolism in the brain, ultimately putting all psychiatric symptoms into permanent remission and allow them to lead a normal, healthy and happy life.

A year ago

Exactly 12 months ago today, the day of my 41st birthday, I was sat in my psychiatrist’s office. I was discussing the merits of Electroshock Therapy as the 20 different psychiatric medications I’d taken over the course of 5 years had failed to make me well. My psychiatrist told me he’d booked me in for my first treatment early the following week and told me to go home and get ready.

It seemed like a sensible idea at first as I was really very sick. I weighed 275lb, my thyroid had failed, my skin was scaly, I was bloated and had terrible gastric problems, my joints were painful, I was stiff, I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol and fatty liver disease, I had migraine headaches which made me vomit, I was deeply depressed most of the time with the occasional manic episode where I would become psychotic and I’d been diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder type 1 with paranoid psychosis. My memory and concentration were desperately poor and I couldn’t recall simple events and would frequently repeat myself. I was frequently unemployed and most likely would not work again. My marriage was pretty much over too as my long-suffering wife could no longer cope with me, and I can’t say I blame her as I wasn’t fun to be around.

Following the appointment, I went home to consider whether frying my brain would be a good idea.  I decided to take a bath and think it over. I’d been struggling to take showers as climbing in and out was difficult and I couldn’t keep my balance. This was a mistake as I discovered I was so fat and weak that I couldn’t get out of the tub and was trapped! As I lay there in the increasingly tepid water it gave me time to reflect on how I’d ended up like this.

To understand how I reached this point I need to take you back to July 2011.

How I became ill

July 2011 - France

I was 35, I had a beautiful wife and a one-year old son. I had a wonderful job that I loved doing and a lovely home in central London. I was in pretty good health and my only problems were persistent stomach pain and bloating and the occasional migraine headache. I had undergone testing for coeliac disease but this had come back negative and been ruled out. As a matter of fact, I’d just ended a strict gluten free diet following confirmation that I didn’t have celiac and I could now enjoy all the food on offer, something I took full advantage of while holidaying in France that summer. Life was good.

However, on returning home from my holiday I started to struggle with terrible fatigue and poor concentration. I saw my GP and she prescribed an anti-depressant and sent me on my way. Three days later my life turned upside down.

It was a typical Monday morning as far as I was concerned and I was sat at my desk with my coffee, just like I had done on every other day for the previous 10 years before then, when suddenly, and without warning, I suffered a huge onset of psychiatric problems. My mood destabilised, I developed problems with my vision and I started to hallucinate. I lost the ability to perform basic tasks such as shopping, brushing my teeth and feeding myself and this all happened in the blink of an eye. It was by far the most horrific thing that has ever happened to me, far worse than I can reasonably describe, as in that moment my brain, the thing that is everything that makes me who I am, stopped functioning correctly.

I was sent to a psychiatrist who immediately detained me in hospital and started a regime of psychiatric medication. I was told I now had a catastrophic and life changing illness that I would never recover from and that I was condemned to suffer with for the rest of my life.

The Nightingale Psychiatric Hospital

I was told I would never be the same again.

My symptoms included deep depression, full-blown mania, psychosis, hallucinations and later mixed mood episodes, which were very uncomfortable. There were times that I lost insight and would behave erratically and sometimes dangerously. I could no longer function well enough to live independently.

This went on for five and a half years.

Medication

Over those five years my psychiatrist prescribed a potent cocktail of drugs including mood-stabilisers, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, tranquillisers and sleeping pills. The side-effects were terrible.

May 2015 - Heavily medicated

In fact, the drugs I was prescribed were designed to do just one thing: shut down my brain and suppress my symptoms. This was on top of the damage my brain had already suffered due to whatever it was that was making me sick in the first place! By shutting down my brain I could no longer concentrate or think clearly, a concept nicknamed ‘spellbinding’ by some people in the industry; a technique used by psychiatrists with great effect to ensure compliance with treatment.

And this is why none of the drugs seemed to do me any good whatsoever, and why I assumed that I was normal and that some people were just unlucky like me and suffered with health problems, yet my doctor kept prescribing those drugs and I kept duly taking them in the hope that they might just allow me to lead a normal life again. But they never worked.

For me, I think the worst was that I lost ability to read and play my piano, and my ability to converse freely with my friends and family suffered too. My short-term memory was affected badly and I struggled to create new memories and today there are huge gaps where I don’t remember much of those years. Sadly, this includes most of my young son’s life. I could also no longer feel the depth and range of emotions that normal people feel.

Over the next five years I was hospitalised five times. I developed further symptoms including neurological problems, vascular disease, haematological diseases, metabolic diseases, including fatty liver, obesity, insulin resistance, gastrointestinal diseases, nutrient deficiencies, joint pain and even hair loss on my legs. The lithium I was prescribed accelerated my autoimmune thyroiditis and within 18 months I was fully hypothyroid.

I had over 120 symptoms in total

I lost my job and had my government security clearance revoked meaning I could no longer work in my industry sector and I struggled to provide for my family. To complicate things further my son was diagnosed with autism so my wife had to give up work completely to care for the two of us.

Like so many people with a diagnosis of severe mental illness I believed that there was no cure. I lost all hope. If it wasn’t for my wife and son I may have chosen to end my own life.

My 'cure'

So there I was, after five years of ineffective treatment, stuck in the bathtub. It took me almost half an hour of struggling before I eventually rolled my huge bulk over the side and on to the floor.

That was my very lowest point, right there on the bathroom floor. It was also the point I decided that I didn’t want to feel like this anymore and I was going to advocate for my own health and figure out why I was so sick! The following day I discharged myself from my psychiatrist and began the painful process of weaning myself off all my medication.

**Please don’t do this unless you know what you’re doing! Stopping psychiatric medication can be dangerous and can make you even sicker**

Once I was off the drugs I found, to my amazement, that I didn't get any sicker and in fact I regained a great of deal my mental faculties including my ability to read. So, I started to read everything I could find about my disease and what the root cause of it might be. I even wrote to some of the world’s leading specialists in psychiatry and in neurology and slowly I started to find some answers.

The first clue was my multiple autoimmune diseases, including my damaged thyroid. I uncovered evidence in my records of atrophic gastritis, pernicious anaemia and wheat intolerance. Could those same antibodies that had damaged so much of my body and destroyed the very important gland in my neck also be responsible for my damaged brain?

My records also showed that there had been occasions where amy symptoms had gone into remission! There is nothing unusual about that, bipolar disorder is episodic by nature and people do go into remission, before becoming unwell again. But those periods of remission coincided with when I went on a low carbohydrate weight loss diet to try and lose weight.

Could it be that simple? Could it really be something I was eating that was making me unwell and causing all my symptoms?

On January 25th 2017, exactly 7 months ago today I started the Autoimmune Protocol diet, a diet based on the principles of paleo, where you remove any foods that might make you sick, and eat plenty of the foods that provide your body with all the nutrients it needs to function and to heal.

So, I ate loads of vegetables, a little organic grass-fed meat and fish and some fruit every day and that was it.

It took me ten days to get completely well.

2 photos taken 16 weeks apart

It was beyond belief how well I felt. The inflammation that had bloated my body fell away and within a fortnight my face had changed beyond recognition. My skin rashes cleared up and the abdominal bloating decreased. I never had another migraine again. But the most incredible improvement was my mental health. My moods completely stabilised, I could think clearly and rationally, I no longer had balance and coordination problems and I found I could recall events and read again. Over the next few months every single one of my symptoms went into remission!

Today I feel more well than at any point in my whole life! I have more energy than I know what to do with. I work out regularly and cycle twice a day. I sleep well, I feel alert and refreshed, indeed everything about me is just better. My clinical psychologist says my IQ has risen 30 points in 6 months and I now have an IQ of over 150.

I am still me, but I feel like I’ve been upgraded to version 2.0. The Autoimmune Protocol diet saved my life.

My research

Since my amazing recovery I haven’t stopped researching this highly unusual disease and this is what I’ve learned.

I discovered was that certain foods I was eating were triggering my immune system. My own body was mis-identifying certain foods as foreign invaders and trying to get rid of them, just like it would with a virus. Over many years of prolonged exposure to these foods my immune system started to attack my own bodies tissues, mistaking them for the food particles that had entered my blood stream. And one day in July 2011 those antibodies started to attack my brain.

Many psychiatric illnesses, from depression through to schizophrenia, can be caused by any number of different antibodies produced by our own immune systems, and that many antibodies are triggered by food sensitivities. I had a letter from Dr Belinda Lennox, a professor of immuno-psychiatry at Oxford University, explaining that autoantibodies are responsible for 9% of all cases of psychotic illness. Antibodies such as NMDAR and LGI1 are already known to cause seizures and encephalitis but new discoveries have shown that these antibodies can also cause major psychiatric disorders. However, the medical community have very little idea how to detect it and absolutely no idea how to treat it, so they just dish out pills to shut down the brain, something I’m sure the pharmaceutical companies are very happy about.

I’ve also learned that there are 8 times as many people with a non-coeliac reaction to gluten as there are those with a coeliac diagnosis. It’s far more common than we realise. The reason for this is there are many more types of gluten protein than the one that contains alpha gliadin that is found in wheat, barley and rye. Beta gliadin, omega gliadin, gamma gliadin, wheat germ agglutinin and de-amidated gliadin are also found in wheat. There are several types of prolamine found in corn, rice, millet, oats, sorghum and triticale and if you react to these then just cutting out wheat won’t help.

The antibodies to these glutens can have a devastating impact on other parts of the body and not even touch your gut. What’s more, 92% of people with coeliac disease don’t heal on a traditional gluten free diet. On average, they go on to develop 7 other autoimmune diseases in their lifetime.

Doctors know how to test for antibodies to alpha gliadin, endomysium and transglutaminase 2 as these are the antibodies to the gluten found in wheat that leads to coeliac disease. They also know how to test for antibodies to transglutaminase 3 and 5 that can lead to skin conditions, but by far the most common organ that is affected by gluten is the brain.

Antibodies to wheat germ agglutinin can cause hypoperfusion where blood flow to the brain is affected, they can even pass through the blood brain barrier and attach to the myelin sheath, the protective coating around the neurons, and this affects the plasticity of the brain and can lead to cognitive difficulties and memory impairment.

Autoantibodies to transglutaminase 6 can damage brain and nerve tissue, leading to ataxia and even psychosis. Research has shown that transglutaminase 6 plays a critical role in cortical and cerebellar neurons and that around 10% of patients with gluten sensitivity develop neurologic involvement, or peripheral neuropathy.

Just to make things even more complicated you can also have antibodies to a totally different protein in gluten called glutenin.

So why aren’t doctors testing for this? Well it’s because this is still very new to medicine and is still being researched. It takes on average about 17 years for a new discovery to finally make it into mainstream medicine, so we are likely still 10 years away from your GP knowing about this.

In my case the main culprits were the wheat, barley, rye and oats, and I have a lesser reaction to rice, corn, nuts and seeds so just going wheat free wasn’t enough. The autoimmune protocol diet eliminated them completely and allowed me to get well.

Today I have lost 75lb and for the first time since I was a teenager I weigh under 200lb. I am in better health than I ever have been and I’m enjoying physical activity for the first time in my life.

I’m not a spiritual person but this is as close to a miracle that I can imagine.