In 1967, Nobel prize winner Dr Linus Pauling, one of the founders of molecular biology, chanced across several papers written by Dr Abram Hoffer and Dr Humphry Osmond. To his astonishment, the Canadian psychiatrists were doing something unheard of: treating schizophrenic patients with niacin, a simple vitamin B3 pill. And, even more amazingly, they’d been prescribing huge amounts of the stuff—as much as 17,000 mg a day, 1,000 times the US Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) at the time.
The RDA was set as the absolute minimum to prevent disease—in the case of niacin, to prevent pellagra. But when someone was ill, you could apparently treat it by boosting that dosage 1,000 times without a negative effect, something you could never do with drugs.
As Pauling later wrote, “I thought that these substances, normally present in the human body, and required for good health and life, deserved a name to distinguish them from ordinary pharmaceuticals, and I decided to call them ‘orthomolecular’ substances.”
Pauling coined the name for what Hoffer and Osmond had been working on since the 1950s as a novel approach to treat psychiatric patients. Osmond theorized that schizophrenics suffer from an adrenaline-based hallucinogen, produced by their own bodies, which led to what became known as the Hoffer-Osmond Adrenochrome Hypothesis.
Doctors like Dr William Kaufman, among the first to prescribe megadoses of B3 (as niacin or niacinamide) for arthritis, also recognized that deficiencies or larger-than-normal requirements for certain nutrients might be behind many so-called mental illnesses, such as what is now known as ADHD. Like Osmond, Kaufman showed that a doctor could prescribe heroic dosages of certain vitamins and minerals to those patients without untoward effects. Clearly they needed far more of certain nutrients than normal.
The physician and biochemist Carl Pfeiffer took up the mantle, studying the metabolism of trace elements and minerals in various types of schizophrenia. In 1973 he founded the Princeton BioCenter and learned to divide schizophrenics into three categories of imbalances:
- Histapenia – histamine deficiency
- Histadelia – high blood histamine
- Pyroluria – elevated pyrroles in the urine, leading to zinc and vitamin B6 deficiencies
As Pfeiffer noted, all of these were chemically induced metabolic disorders, which meant there was a strong possibility that all “true” schizophrenia “left in the ‘wastebasket’ of medicine” might simply be due to biochemical abnormalities.
All these early pioneers recognized something that medicine refused to consider: so-called mental illness may have more to do with faulty biochemistry than a disorder in the brain. Indeed, the nutritional deficiencies were exactly what caused hallucinations, strange thoughts and even depression.
The Princeton BioCenter went on to treat thousands of patients who’d been institutionalized for schizophrenia and other “mental” illnesses. Some years ago, Bryan and I met “John,” who’d been languishing in a psychiatric hospital when he heard about the BioCenter.
He asked his family to smuggle in some supplements recommended by the center for his type of schizophrenia. Within several weeks after he began taking the supplements, most of his symptoms disappeared, and he walked out the door and on to a normal life.
Now, decades later, many cases of so-called mental illnesses—paranoia, delusions, confusion, agitation, even seizures and depression—are being traced to an autoimmune disorder, in which the immune system is actually attacking the brain.
Until fairly recently, neurologists believed the brain was impregnable by any assaults from the immune system. But now, , it’s slowly dawning on medical science that the so-called blood-brain barrier is dynamic and permeable and that certain cells of the immune system can slip through and affect the brain as well as the body.
Doctors have long recognized that patients with a variety of autoimmune diseases also appear to suffer from mental illness. A majority of patients with conditions as disparate as systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis and celiac disease display psychiatric conditions, from depression and anxiety to outright psychosis.
This is not a coincidence. Many such cases are due to autoimmune encephalitis, in which the immune system attacks certain cells in the hippocampus and frontal lobes, eventually blocking connections and leading to a host of psychiatric symptoms always put down to a separate mental disease.
In recent years, the medical community has been forced to revisit “mental” illness and acknowledge that much of it is indeed a disorder, but not of the brain but of the immune system. The field of autoimmune encephalitis is now exploding, and many psychiatric patients are now screened for autoimmune antibodies.
As psychiatric drugs have been found extraordinarily inadequate for treating the ever-growing categories of mental illness, and the pharmaceutical industry is reluctant to invest in new psychiatric preparations, the time to view mental illness through a new lens is long overdue.
Sixty years after the pioneering work of Pauling, Osmond and Pfeiffer, it’s finally dawning on medicine that a good deal of psychosis results from a brain under attack. And once you treat the misfirings of the immune system, the untold numbers of patients being drugged in psychiatric wards may have a fighting chance to get better and, like John, get out of there.
