After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as "mental illness": there is just nutritional deficiency and food intolerance. Not convinced? Let me try and persuade you...

A couple of weeks ago, I had the following conversation with a friend:

Friend: "I've been having awful panic attacks lately, and I feel really anxious all the time, and I've no idea why. Work's great, things are going really well with the guy I've started seeing, no problems with family - but I just feel really on edge all the time."

Me: "Are you still taking magnesium?"

"No... I stopped a few months ago."

"Try taking it again, with some 5-HTP."

She ordered it there and then and it arrived the next day.

A week later, I got the following message:

"My panic attacks have completely stopped and I don't even feel anxious."

I knew to recommend magnesium for seemingly inexplicable anxiety, as about ten years ago, I was back and forth to the doctors with palpitations and panic attacks.

"It's anxiety," said the doctor. "You need to see a mental health professional."

I disagreed with this "diagnosis", so I did some of my own research (cue frothing at the mouth from fomenting normies who believe the only people who are allowed to use the word 'research' are those with multiple postgraduate qualifications in statistical methodology - although please note such people are by far the most likely to be vaccine-sceptic).

I discovered that, by some considerable margin, the most common cause of anxiety and attendant symptoms of palpitations and panic attacks, is a magnesium deficiency, and that, due to the inadequacies of modern farming methods which have led to nutrient depletion in the soil, along with modern habits such as caffeine and alcohol which strip certain key nutrients from the body, almost everyone in the West is deficient in magnesium.

I began taking a magnesium supplement, and my palpitations and panic disappeared within a week, and the only time they have returned is when I've run out of magnesium and gone a few weeks without taking it.

Similarly, when I've started to feel really tired, apathetic, and listless, modern psychiatry would say, "depression". A little further research (arrrgghh, sorry normies - and yes, it does sometimes involve Google!!) clarified the cause was actually iron deficiency, which is epidemic in women under 50. An increase in iron-rich foods (preferably animal-sourced as the iron is much more bioavailable - absorbable - than from plants) and an iron supplement, and my alleged "depression" went away.

Please note that there was never any credible evidence for the "chemical imbalance in the brain" theory of depression, which was invented entirely out of whole cloth in order to flog antidepressants, and it is now recognised, even in the mainstream, that one primary cause of depression is inflammation, and guess what the number one cause of inflammation is - bad diet (another primary and well-known cause of inflammation, again acknowledged by the mainstream, is vaccination).

Leading on from this is that, while relatively mild "psychiatric" issues are often actually nutritional in nature, so are more serious things, like schizophrenia. It has been known since the 1970s that schizophrenia is manifested by the consumption of wheat, and that societies that consume no wheat, have no schizophrenia. As soon as wheat is introduced to a population, their schizophrenia rates instantly hit Western levels.

Despite this fact, there remains no official recommendation for schizophrenics or their families to avoid wheat.

Similarly, it is well known amongst alternative communities that gluten (wheat protein) and casein (milk protein) exacerbate symptoms of autism, and removing them from the diet tends to result in a dramatic improvement in symptoms. The much-maligned Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist by profession, made this observation, and noted how much resistance there was amongst "the experts" to the idea that what you put in your stomach could have an effect on your brain. Talking to a sceptical colleague, who insisted there was no relationship between what we consume and how our brains work, Wakefield said,

"Fancy a beer?"

In so doing, Wakefield was drawing attention to the fact that, while we widely accept putting alcohol into your stomach affects how your brain works, we eschew the idea that any other foodstuffs could have equally powerful effects. But why wouldn't they? They can and they do.

So, before you diagnose yourself - or your doctor does - with anxiety, depression, or something more serious, check out what you're eating (or aren't).

The most common nutrient deficiencies in the West are:

*Magnesium

*Vitamin D

*B-vitamins

*Zinc

(And for women, iron)

An eminent doctor I once read an interview with, who specialised in treating chronic depressives and cancer patients, said that he had treated hundreds of such patients throughout his career and the one thing every single one of them had in common is that they were deficient in magnesium, B-vitamins, and zinc. Every last one.

Don't pay any attention to conventional "blood tests" that may say you're not deficient in a nutrient, because a) the bar set for adequate levels is extremely low, and regards having enough of the nutrient not to create a deficiency disease like rickets, rather than having an optimal amount, and b) many nutrients, like magnesium, are not primarily stored in the blood. Only 1% of your body's magnesium is stored in the blood, therefore testing your blood to see if you're deficient is effectively meaningless - like most of modern allopathic "medicine".

If you want to learn more about how what you are, and are not, eating can affect your brain and mood, I can't recommend the GAPS (Gut and Psychology Syndrome) book highly enough. It was written for parents of severely autistic children, by a neurologist-turned-nutritionist, who reversed her sons' autism through diet, but you needn't be an autism parent to benefit from reading it - it is relevant to everyone in the modern world, because it explains how the modern diet, combined with powerful toxins such as pesticides, hormonal contraception and antidepressants (which get in the water supply so we're all effectively taking them), and, of course, vaccines have created a perfect storm of nutritional intolerances and deficiencies, which create many of the symptoms we erroneously label "mental illness".

In fact, the father of modern psychiatry, Phillippe Pinel, stated in the 1800s that "the primary seat of insanity is the region of the stomach and intestines", whilst the grandfather of modern medicine, Hippocrates (from whom the 'Hippocratic Oath' derives its name), declared in 400 BC that "all disease begins in the gut".

This leads me to the ineffable conclusion that psychiatry is largely a pseudoscience enabling quacks and criminals (psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies) to profit from nutritional deficiencies. Given that pharmaceutical products are well known to cause nutritional deficiencies by leaching all sorts of key nutrients from the body, this creates the perfect business model of lifelong customers - psychiatric patients who never get better.

So, before forking out a fortune to spend endless hours on the psychiatrist's couch... first look at what's at the end of your fork.

(GAPS book at Book Depository: https://www.bookdepository.com/Gut.../978095485)