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To the Editors:
Betty Hayes writes in her spring 2007 NYC Voices article, “Though Too Late for My Family...”: "Dr. John Mann invented a test about eight or nine years ago to determine the levels of serotonin in the human brain and determined that low serotonin levels go hand-in-hand with clinical depression, which can lead to suicide. This knowledge is a good start, but for the most part, mentally ill people are like guinea pigs. When doctors start to treat them, they don't know which drugs will improve their behavior and which ones will make them worse....”
I want to express my deepest condolences to Betty for the loss of her son from suicide. Kathy Fryer lost her daughter to suicide. That motivated her to open the Fryer Research Center here in Manhattan, which closed down after several decades of service and compassion to the mentally ill due to lack of funds. Fryer Research Center provided low-cost orthomolecular psychiatry (nutritional psychiatry) to the mentally ill. Nutritional psychiatry uses diet plus various supplements (mega-doses of certain vitamins, minerals, amino-acids, herbs, etc.) in order to correct the chemistry of the brain. The two psychiatrists from Canada who developed nutritional psychiatry were not permitted to publish the results of their research and clinical testing by the pharmaceutical companies who pressured editors and publishers of medical journals and psychiatric journals in the 1950s.
As a result, the American public, including the mental health community were never informed that an alternative to chemical medications existed and that solid research and solid clinical testing verified the healing power of nutritional psychiatry. Nutritional psychiatrists often use nutritional supplements combined with a much lower dose of chemical medications in treating some patients. The lower dose of the chemical medication combined with the protective power of the diet and supplement showed that in over 8,000 patients treated by orthomolecular doctors and nutritionally-oriented medical doctors, there were no cases of tardive dyskinesia (TD), a neurological disease characterized by shaking and tremors.
Can someone explain to me why our government leaders who are responsible for public health and public safety have not informed its citizens about nutritional psychiatry as an adjunct to the more conventional psychiatric medications in order to prevent the devastating side-effects of the psychiatric medications? The brain can be corrected and a psychiatric patient can be spared all of the terrible side effects.
I was a patient at the Fryer Research Center from 1970 until it closed in 2006. I continue to follow the dietary plan and supplemental plan. One major problem is that there are no longer a low cost for nutritional psychiatry in the New York City area. Unfortunately very few American psychiatrists are trained nutritional psychiatrists.
Michael Gottlieb
New York City