Jan Ellison Baszucki

It's a big day for the field of Metabolic Psychiatry! Many of you know our origin story--how our son @matthewbaszucki recovered from a five year battle with bipolar disorder using ketogenic and other metabolic therapies. Since then, we've launched @BaszuckiGroup and have backed more than twenty clinical trials of ketogenic therapy for serious mental illness, the first of which are now being published with promising results. We started @Metabolic_Mind to share science, strategies and stories from the field with families like ours. We launched the Coalition for Metabolic Health @metcoalition to advance policy. But there was still a gap. Fourteen months ago, Harvard-trained psychiatrist @GeorgiaEdeMD--one of the founders of the field and a close collaborator of @BaszuckiGroup--came to us with a problem and an opportunity. Her inbox was flooded with messages from practitioners around the world who wanted to be part of the metabolic psychiatry movement. They longed for community and training; they wanted to share what they were learning about using ketogenic and other metabolic therapies to treat and even reverse mental illness and to improve overall well-being in their patients; they wanted to both help and learn from other doctors, nurse practitioners, dieticians, therapists, social workers, health coaches and scientists. Dr. Ede barely had time to reply to all the inquiries; would Baszucki Group step up to help? The answer was a resounding yes. Our dedicated team of scientists, clinicians, program managers, and lived experience experts got right to work. Today, just over a year later, I am thrilled to share that our new initiative--the Global Network for the Advancement of Metabolic Psychiatry (MetPsy) @met_psy--is live! MetPsy is a community of scientists and practitioners dedicated to scaling research, education, and clinical care in metabolic psychiatry worldwide. We launch at a pivotal time. As the field expands, demand for resources has grown among researchers and clinicians, as well as the patients they serve. MetPsy addresses this need by providing a centralized network for professional collaboration, shared resources, access to accredited courses, and tools for advancing clinical practice. Alongside this launch, we've also announced a grant from our family foundation to establish the new McLean Center for Metabolic Psychiatry, a flagship clinical care, research and medical education and training center at @McLeanHospital, a member of Mass General Brigham. Medical education and training initiatives will be co-led by @ChrisPalmerMD's MH² , a clinical practice, training, and education hub. Our prior five years of investments in science, education and clinical care form the foundation for the MetPsy community. It is fitting that this center finds its home in Boston. Along with Stanford, where @ShebaniMD ran the first clinical trial of keto for serious mental illness, Boston has been a birthplace of the field. It was there that pioneering physicians like @GeorgiaEdeMD, @ChrisPalmerMD and @MattBernstein6 (Accord), along with @loricalabresemd in nearby Connecticut, first advanced a new way of understanding and treating mental disorders. Their commitment to the field has helped make this day possible, as has scientific leadership from Harvard and McLean's Dost Unger and Virginie-Anne Chouinard, along with so many others. I want to extend my deepest thanks to the staff at Baszucki Group--especially the MetPsy team led by Executive Director @KirkNylen in close partnership with @julie_milder, Karen Romans and Soly Lee--for the passion and dedication that led to launching this program in record time. As a family, we were blessed with our son's full recovery from what was supposed to be a chronic, lifelong mental illness. Our investment in MetPsy and the new center at McLean is @DavidBaszucki and my way of giving back and offering hope to families like ours. Join the network today!

So delighted to share that this project between @GeorgiaEdeMD, @BaszuckiGroup and @met_psy has come to fruition! A 5-part training on ketogenic therapy for mental health from a pioneer of the field of metabolic psychiatry. Free to anyone on MyCME. @Metabolic_Mind

The documentary film, Healing Humanity, is out now! As one of its executive producers, I'm honored to have played a small role in bringing this project to the world. This big-hearted independent film was made on a shoe-string and was a true labor of love for Kerry Mann and everyone else involved. Five years ago, when our family first learned about ketogenic therapy for mental health, there was almost nothing out there to point people toward. No press coverage. No films. No clinical trials in the scientific literature. Just a handful of individuals and clinicians who were seeing how a specific change in nutrition and metabolism could lead to healing the body and mind. That’s a big part of why I said yes to this film. Healing Humanity began with Kerry Mann Jr., a homesteader suffering from deep depression, who was 100 pounds overweight and was told his congestive heart failure and arthritis were permanent. When Kerry adopted a what he refers to as a proper human diet, he reclaimed his mental and physical health. Then he and his co-director Adam Lacy, who has his own long recovery story from traumatic brain injury, spent three years driving around the country with a camera asking one question: who else has a similar story? The answer turned out to be a lot of people. The film weaves together roughly 60 interviews with physicians, researchers, and ordinary people who got their lives back by returning to a proper human diet. Type 2 diabetes. Depression and anxiety. Autoimmune disease. Chronic pain. Women’s health. Aging. Among the clinicians who sat down with Kerry are @GeorgiaEdeMD, @KenDBerryMD, @SBakerMD, @ifixhearts and @thomasseyfried, and they don’t hold back. What I love most about this film is that it isn’t a lecture. It’s people telling you, in their own words, what it felt like to be told “there’s nothing more we can do,” and what it felt like to find out that wasn’t true--exactly the journey our son @matthewbaszucki travelled. This is the same conversation we’ve been having for years: that what we eat shapes our metabolism, that our metabolism shapes our brains, and that millions of people living with chronic physical and mental illness have never once been told that food might be part of the answer. The science is still catching up to the stories. But the stories are real, and they deserve to be heard. Kerry and Adam made this film independently, funded by thousands of small donors, and they’ve set it up so every dollar from purchases goes first toward giving the film away free to people who can’t afford it. That tells you everything about who they are. Watch it tonight. Then watch it again with a parent, a sibling, or a friend who has been told their diagnosis is forever. Gift it to someone who needs to know that healing is possible. @HHDocumentary Rent or buy here: healinghumanity.movie #HealingHumanity #FoodIsMedicine #ProperHumanDiet