re: RFK- keto diet as cure for schizophrenia

Yeah.

This is about as reasonable a place as this conversation can land (on the poliboard at least ), honestly. You’re holding three ideas at once here that usually get pulled apart:

1. genuine hope that new approaches might help people
2. realism about adherence and human behavior, and
3. awareness that messenger identity now warps how ideas are received

Your point about adherence is underrated. Even when medications clearly help, sticking with them is hard. Sustained dietary change is often harder still. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth studying - but it does mean “cure” talk skips past some very real human constraints.

What’s frustrating is that once an idea is tied to a polarizing figure, it stops being evaluated on its own terms. The same claim said by a different person would trigger a completely different conversation. That’s not great for figuring out what actually helps people.

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So for me, the problem isn’t simply “what did he intend?”

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Seems to me he likely intended "a non-SAD diet - in addition to being overall good for you - might actually hold promise in attenuating mental illnesses, even severe ones."

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That's plausible, but like Spidey says, "with great power comes great responsibility". If you say the COVID vaccine "protects" people will project into that and same goes for "cure". There's a lot of nuance lost in the lossy compression of language.

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I honestly don’t think RFKjr could say anything that wouldn’t be clipped and twisted… that’s a large part of the problem. Sides are already picked and the opposition already disagrees before he says the first word.

Instead of discussing the full benefits of a healthy diet, or even debating what constitutes a healthy diet, this thread devolved into whether two people with positive outcomes even matters. Levels of evidence. How crazy and stupid RFKjr is, etc…

That is a problem that goes beyond how precisely crafted RFKjr’s language is. He could tout the benefits of hydration and we’d be talking lead levels in Flint Michigan and cases of water induced death.

For sure. at this point, no one is asking for angels. Just something that works well enough under battlefield conditions.

The trouble is that language doesn’t degrade gracefully. When it loses precision, it doesn’t just get fuzzy - it gets reassigned.

“Protects” sounds reassuring until people discover it doesn’t mean what they imported into it. Then suddenly the problem isn’t imperfect messengers - it’s betrayal.

Which is why it’s still worth fussing about words - not because we expect purity, but because expectations have a habit of showing up later with invoices.

Let’s use logic. If someone with schz is “listening” and have the wherewithal to want to ge better and they try the diet and it doesn’t work, they will try the next thing because they will still want to get better. If they don’t have the wherewithal to want to get better, it doesn’t fricking matter anyway.

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For sure. at this point, no one is asking for angels. Just something that works well enough under battlefield conditions.

The trouble is that language doesn’t degrade gracefully. When it loses precision, it doesn’t just get fuzzy - it gets reassigned.

“Protects” sounds reassuring until people discover it doesn’t mean what they imported into it. Then suddenly the problem isn’t imperfect messengers - it’s betrayal.

Which is why it’s still worth fussing about words - not because we expect purity, but because expectations have a habit of showing up later with invoices.

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I'm actively seeking wrecking balls at this point. Institutionalized medicine has been an abject failure. (I'm speaking of chronic care. Acute care is spectacular. For chronic conditions, we haven't even budged in 100 years).

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The best is the big media push for TD meds. TD is a side affect of psychiatric drugs that treat things like depression and suicidal thoughts. Guess what the side affects of the TD drug are? You guessed it. Depression and suicidal thoughts.

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Circle jerk (jerk, jerk, jerk) of despair.

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As if an unmedicated schizophrenic believes they have a mental illness.

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The owls in graduation hats and monocles flying around my head wont stop telling me to harm others and nobody else seems sees them.

They keep asking how many licks to the center of tootsie pop too

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SallysHuman

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Stop it owl

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Why do psychiatrists and psychologists wish to see blood tests if diet is not to be considered?

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Because bloods can tell a doctor that the patient acting crazy isn't actually crazy but drunk - you can tell that from a blood test. Of course that almost certainly would be obviou before, but that was just a simple example

Also your bloods determine what medicine you can be given. Some medicine is great but does a number on your Kidneys or Liver and if you already have ciirrhosis, a course of medicine X might kill you....and the doctor does not want to kill you.