I was surprised by how simple it was to get my hands on meth—well, a “cousin” of meth. While my peers had their creative and often less-than-legal ways of buying these “miracle drugs”—like Adderall and its chemical relatives—I was just handed a prescription, without even seeking it, by a psychiatrist after a very brief, initial appointment with her.

Most high schoolers my age were looking for attention in a bottle. Earlier that month, my friend from high school lost her older brother to an overdose on the same amphetamine stimulants written on a little piece of paper like the one that my psychiatrist had handed to me. I did not expect to be entrusted with such a powerful chemical by a stranger—despite his medical and educational accolades—merely by answering several questions from the DSM.

I was not the “type” you’d expect to be sitting on the other side of a psychiatrist’s desk. At 22, I was smiling, outgoing, active, and driven, the product of a posh Los Angeles suburb and, most importantly, a loving family. As a soon-to-be college graduate launching into the working world, I had “everything” one could ask for. Yet I hadn’t been given anything to explain the murky waters beneath my chipper surface visible to the outside world.

I soon learned my initial visit to a psychiatrist was statistically unsurprising. Nearly a fifth of all U.S. adults and a quarter of all U.S. women are currently taking antidepressants, the highest rate of antidepressant prescription per capita in the world. Prescription stimulants to treat ADHD, like the one I was prescribed, doubled in the United States between 2006 and 2016. In many ways, my prescription just confirmed that I was a “typical American.”

Are we truly destined for mental illness in the modern age, or has our environment become so incompatible with human flourishing that it's making us sick?

Moreover, my family history with mental health stacked the cards in favor of this fate. “It was merely a matter of time,” my psychiatrist told me reassuringly, referring to my family’s generational battle with depression. “There was nothing I could do to avoid it.”

Yet such deterministic assurances intended to comfort me lasted about five seconds. Believing that a mental disorder is your inevitable fate that can, at best, be “managed” is little source for empowerment, and my psychiatrist wasn’t much of a source either.

Perhaps if she had taught me cognitive behavioral tools, nutritional protocols, or other ways to supplement my medication, I would have emerged healthier and happier from the following three years of taking my prescription antidepressants and stimulants. Instead, each of our expensive weekly meetings resembled the first:

“How do you feel?” “I’m managing, work is going well, but basic things like getting out of bed in the morning, finding motivation, and not feeling like a burden still feel overwhelming.”

I would leave the appointment with a prescription for an increased dosage and no tools to help my cognitive patterns during the week.

This standard American mental health treatment continued for three years, and all that I had to show for it was 70-plus pounds of excess weight gain and five times the amount of my initially prescribed dos age. Unlike my body weight, my tether to see hope and purpose in life was wearing dangerously thin. “This can’t be the only way,” I thought.

It wasn’t. But it took my own path of discovery to find out.

Something Has Gone Awry

It is clear that something is deeply amiss with the current psychiatric and medical complex that profits from these “treatments” while Americans are getting sicker, more depressed, and more hopeless. Large-scale studies published by the National Institute of Health indicate that the most commonly prescribed form of antidepressants, select serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), provide no greater relief to depressive symptoms than placebo groups.

Moreover, the Harvard School of Medicine reported in 2011 that the rates of depression have increased 400% since Prozac came on the market in 1988. In treating mental illness as a mysterious, indescribable illness that can only be diagnosed symptomatically and treated with expensive drugs that have a very poor track record, we seem to have gone off the rails. Perhaps we have misunderstood the nature of mental illness altogether?

Are we truly destined for mental illness in the modern age, or has our environment become so incompatible with human flourishing that it’s making us sick? In the book Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, head of Stanford’s addiction clinic, poignantly asks: “In medicating ourselves to adapt to the world, what kind of world are we settling for?”

In my case, it was clear that unless I changed the environment I had settled for, I was going to cave under its weight. This was a survival mission—I had to do everything to win back my life. Nothing could be off the table.

Another Way

Help arrived in a curious way. In May 2021, several years after I had turned my scramble of writing gigs into a budding career, I was assigned an article by an online publication to expose the effects of watching porn on the brain. Little did I know that this article assignment would, in no exaggeration, change my life.

My editor recommended that I look into this new podcaster called Andrew Huberman. At the time, his podcast only had a few episodes. Since then, the "HubermanLab" podcast skyrocketed to a top three podcast, just behind Joe Rogan in annual listeners. His accolades as a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the Stanford School of Medicine immediately caught my attention. He talked a lot about dopamine, a neurotransmitter that, at the time, I had only regarded as the “feel-good” chemical that junkies chased by taking drugs. What did it have to do with a “non-addict” like me?

Huberman was on a mission to change the narrative about dopamine, this chemical in our brain that has everything to do with its proper functioning. Dopamine, he said, is critical for basic bodily movement, goal pursuit, and motivation. Its release connects to getting out of bed in the morning, going to work, finishing tasks, and reaching achievements. Could it be, I wondered, that dopamine is part of the depression puzzle? Is that why I struggled with motivation, getting out of bed, and basic movement?

Huberman was also the first person to explain to me what major depressive disorder and ADHD were in a biochemical sense, something I never learned from my psychiatrist. I was never told that dopamine is inextricably connected to serotonin, that elusive neurotransmitter linked to the feelings of purpose and meaning my brain apparently lacked, and that there are natural ways of raising tonic dopamine and serotonin levels, like consuming more than 1000 mg of EPA fatty acids: daily fish oil supplements, fresh fish like salmon, vitamin D accompanied with K2, cold immersion, routine exercises like zone 2 cardio, or simply soaking up regular doses of sunlight.

I also learned that diet is arguably one of the most critical pillars of caring for mental health, regardless of whether you are taking medication or not. Ninety percent of dopamine and serotonin are synthesized in the gut, directly accessing the brain. Ultra-processed foods, alcohol, and other substances that have become overindulged in our cushy 21st-century world are chronically destroying the microbiome army in our gut that creates the neurotransmitters necessary to live a basic, functioning, and, I dare hope, a flourishing life.

Image by Frontier

I was doubtful that something as simple as a “healthy diet” could make a dent in my major depressive disorder where medication had failed. However, Huberman’s interview with Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer, arguably the most impactful interview I have encountered, gave me the impetus to give radical diet change a shot.

Palmer broke away from the medical/psychiatric establishment by exploring the impact of diet on mental health. After witnessing his mental health heal through adopting a high-protein, low-carb ketogenic diet, he began testing whether the diet had any effect on his patients with treatment-resistant mental health disorders. The results were akin to miraculous.

Many of Palmer’s patients, most of whom had spent decades rotating in and out of psychiatric hospitals, entered remission after adopting his prescribed ketogenic diet. One of his patients with a decades-long schizoaffective disorder healed from chronic, manic hallucinations. He got better in other ways, too: he became capable of building healthy relationships, he lost over 100 pounds, and, after living as a recluse for over a decade, he started a career in standup comedy.

It sounded too good to be true. I was intrigued. After all, at that point, I had nothing to lose.

Healing Through Food

The ketogenic diet isn’t a “fad” diet. It was developed to treat a mental disorder, specifically epilepsy, by Dr. Russell Wilder with the Mayo Clinic in 1921. After observing how his young epileptic patients would stop seizing when they were in between meals, Dr. Wilder created the ketogenic diet to mimic the fasted state by eliminating major glucose spikes, essentially tricking the body into believing that it was fasting. The results were staggering.

Dr. Palmer explained that many patients with depression find remission after adopting a strict ketogenic diet because most antidepressants are derivatives of anti-epilepsy medications. Dr. Palmer posited that there is a common biochemical cause linking all mental disorders: metabolic dysfunction of the brain, which the ketogenic diet could help heal. I thought there could be something to Dr. Palmer’s protocol, so I gave it the old college try.

To this day, I wish I could thank Dr. Palmer for the results that ensued the following year from adopting a radical ketogenic diet based on real, whole, unprocessed foods. When I first began the diet, I was ashamed by how my 217-pound body couldn’t do the things that it was able to do before I started taking medication. A single box jump seemed impossible, and I couldn’t run for more than a mile. My body “kept the score,” as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk puts it, from the previous three years.

Over the course of a year on the ketogenic diet, I shed more than 70 pounds of excess weight I had gained. Running 10 miles and doing 100+ box jumps are now regular features in my fitness protocol.

As wonderful as the weight loss and fitness benefits from the ketogenic diet were, the truly wondrous things took place within my mind. About a month into the diet, the first feelings of contentment, peace, and, at last, more than a flicker of joy returned after a years-long hiatus. You can experience these sensations with depression, but they are muted, cold, and always tinged with sadness and often a sense of futility. These newfound versions of hope were akin to winter sunlight breaking through a blanket of dark clouds.

Several months into the diet, I had weaned myself off all my medication completely. I haven’t taken them since.

Mental Health Is a “Full Body” Rescue Mission

It’s difficult to calculate how much my psychiatrist, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies profited from my three years on medication, but I was certainly a regular-paying patient. If they had their way, I would have been a profitable customer for life. When a system profits from keeping people sick, it’s difficult not to become suspicious of their intentions.

The truth is, though, I wouldn’t have been a lifelong customer regardless of what happened. I simply couldn’t accept that depression dictated the quality of life I was “predestined” to manage for the long term, and unless something changed, I grew fearful that life would one day become unendurable.

Many health and wellness influencers are avidly campaigning to rid the market of antidepressants altogether, claiming that they are nothing more than a placebo that does more harm than good. Often, that is true. In other cases, antidepressants have been critical in giving people some ground to stand on when they are slipping towards dangerous precipices. I don’t think we should be too hasty in dismissing antidepressants categorically.

However, there is also a desperate need for treatment options for mental health other than an automatic prescription for Zoloft, Wellbutrin, or Lexapro in the case of depression, and pharmaceutical-grade, speed-like Adderall or Ritalin for so-called ADHD. Patients who find themselves on the other side of a psychiatrist's desk, as I did, need to be treated as whole, integrated beings, not just petri dishes whose prescriptions are a source of profit rather than holistic healing.

Mental health care should be a full body rescue mission, offering nutritional, fitness, and cognitive behavioral tools to supplement if not completely replace, pharmaceutical options. However, as long as the mental health industry profits from pharmaceutical options alone and routine psychiatric visits, the impetus falls on individual patients to seek these supplementations—or alternatives—themselves. I highly recommend you do—it may change your life, as it did mine.

Katarina Bradford is the assistant editor of Frontier. She has contributed to several publications including Blaze Media, Return, and Evie Magazine.