Can Keto Diet Help Your Mental Health? Sure Maybe.
Also: dealing with the news, a therapy gecko, and an item from Duh
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How can we attempt to handle all this shit in the news?
This week’s episode is built for people who are not directly affected by the news that’s been coming out of the Middle East, Israel and Gaza, over the last few months, but who feel the impact of it nonetheless. Because I think that situation, as well as the effects of the covid pandemic, are grieving situations without a lot of context around that grief. We see numbers of people dead and those numbers and sometimes those circumstances are too much to really wrap our brains around and so we might be tempted to check out entirely and just stop caring. Or we could go the other way and take on the full empathic weight of those situations and run the risk of crushing ourselves emotionally.
I reached out to the person I know who knows the most about grief and that’s Megan Devine. She’s a therapist, author of the book It’s OK That You’re Not OK, and host of the podcast of that same name. In the podcast this week, she endorses the idea of engagement with what’s happening but having that come from a place of compassion rather than one of pure empathy, which is an important distinction. In compassion, you witness what’s happening and you are present for the suffering of others whereas with empathy, you absorb the horror that other people are absorbing. Megan also suggests setting boundaries and limitations for yourself, with things like social media for instance. You’re not uncaring if you’re not taking all the news in all the time, you’re just taking some time to care for yourself as well.
Keto diet is not just a thing someone talks your ear off about at a party, it can actually help a lot with mental illness
NPR has a long article about the success being found for people dealing with bipolar and schizophrenia who switch to a high fat, high protein keto diet.
Palmer had his own revelation about the diet a few years earlier, which he detailed in a 2017 case report. Two patients with schizo-affective disorder had "truly dramatic, life-changing improvement in their psychotic symptoms," he says.
In early 2021, he started working with the eldest son of Jan and David Baszucki, a wealthy tech entrepreneur. Their son Matt had bipolar disorder and had been on many medications in recent years.
Jan Baszucki enlisted Palmer's help as her son gave the ketogenic diet a try.
"Within a couple of months, we saw a dramatic change," she says.
Benefits were also seen for depression and high blood pressure.
Women’s mental health suffers in abortion ban states
Time magazine has an article about a study on the increase in depression and anxiety among women living in states that have been most restrictive since the fall of Roe v. Wade.
They zoomed in on women who lived in 13 states with so-called “trigger laws,” or preemptive abortion bans designed to snap into effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
From June 2022 through the end of the year, these women had larger increases in depression and anxiety symptoms than those in the 37 other states. “The pattern is abundantly clear,” says Jennifer Payne, professor and vice chair of research in the University of Virginia’s department of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences, who was not involved with the study. The finding reinforces that the Supreme Court’s decision “was a shock,” she says. “This is not something that most women were expecting.”
These findings were also reported in DUH magazine
Therapy Gecko: Unmasking the Internet’s Unofficial Therapist
I can talk to you if you want me to
One of my favorite things to do in the world is travel places to give speeches. I have spoken to community groups, corporations, schools, and just about everywhere else. A fun run, once. Another time at the Carter Center in Atlanta. I give speeches about mental health and wellness, delayed covid trauma, the optimism I have for fighting mental health stigma, and more. The speeches are well-received, judging from the rave feedback I’ve been receiving. Perhaps you would like me to come talk to your group? It’s easy to arrange! Just visit Collective Speakers and get in touch with my friends there.
This week on Sleeping with Celebrities: Sandeep Parikh
We take a discussion about being the president of an HOA all the way to dreamland.
Sandeep Parikh is well known to anyone who followed the web series The Guild, where he played Zaboo. Sandeep is a writer, producer, director, and comedian in Hollywood, where he also, very importantly, serves as president of his local homeowner’s association. It is this role that he explores in meticulous depth in a soothing interview that gently tackles the legal dispute between Sandeep’s southern California neighbors and a contractor who did a terrible job. Hear how Sandeep reluctantly rose to power in the HOA, how he may be trapped in office for some time to come, and how the experience led to writing an HOA-based television pilot. Imagine how snooze-inducing micro-politics can be. This is that.