From Postpartum Bipolar Diagnosis to Metabolic Psychiatry: A Story of Healing and Community
12th-18th May is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK, and this year’s theme is ‘community’. At the Hub for Metabolic Psychiatry, people with lived experience of severe mental illness are central to our research efforts. As active members of our research community, their insights guide our work and ensure that our approach is rooted in real-world challenges. In this blog, Hub Lived Experience Group member, Dyane Harwood, shares her powerful story of navigating postpartum bipolar disorder, finding support through peer groups, and ultimately discovering a sense of belonging within the emerging field of metabolic psychiatry.
Image by Digital Artist, Julianne Bonnet: “I created ‘Friends Abide’ to represent community in the truest sense: a feeling of unyielding support and fellowship, even in the most trying of times.” Find Julianne on Instagram.
When I was diagnosed with postpartum bipolar I disorder after the birth of my second child, my sense of community vanished. Before my diagnosis, I had a full life as a wife, mother, and freelance writer. I believed in the value of community and pitched a column to the editor of my local paper titled Finding My Village. (I landed the job!) But my bipolar depression smothered my extroverted personality, and I wanted to hide from the world. Suffice to say, I would not be finding that village in the near future.
After my beloved father’s death, I became suicidal, and I asked for electroconvulsive therapy, which saved my life. I was fortunate to have minimal side effects, and I had no regrets over doing the much-maligned procedure. Over time, I slowly began to function and process my grief, yet I felt distinctly alone as a person living with a serious mental illness.
Eventually, I found an exceptional psychiatrist who added the MAOI tranylcypromine to the lithium I had been taking for years; that combination lifted my treatment-resistant bipolar depression within a week! But I remained profoundly lonely. I noticed stirrings of yearning to be in a community of women like me — mothers who suffered from mood disorders. There was a dearth of mental health support groups in the mountain valley where I lived, so I contacted the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA), a non-profit that sponsored peer-facilitated support groups. After much deliberation, I leapt outside my comfort zone to create a DBSA chapter to sponsor my peer support group.
I found a yoga business willing to donate space for our first group meeting geared for moms with mental illness. I promoted the DBSA group through my newspaper contacts and social media and met amazing mothers who lived with mental illnesses including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. After several years passed, I needed a break from facilitating the DBSA chapter, and no one was willing to take over the leadership, so it dissolved.
I still yearned to be in a mental-health-focused community, but with less personal responsibility. I started an online Meetup group for older moms since I fell in that category! My effort to build community wasn’t all for naught. Although twenty women RSVP’d to our first meeting at a park, only one mom showed up. To my delight, she turned out to become one of my best friends— it was worth creating the group for that reason alone.
Community can be built in other ways besides in-person or online groups. I found the mental health blogging community to be a wonderful, low-key way to give and receive support. Over the years, I interacted with incredible writers from my home state of California to South Africa to the UK and beyond. After I published 400 blog posts, I wound down my blogging to focus on writing my first book while raising my children with my husband.
Life continued to challenge and surprise me in ways both good and bad.
When I was 47, I read an intriguing profile about a local film producer while I recuperated from a broken jaw. I watched What The Health, a documentary about veganism that he co-produced.
I didn’t expect a mere film could possibly influence me to become a vegan, but it did!
Moreover, I grew eager to learn everything I could about food and mood, and I took several online nutrition and mental health courses. These classes validated my sense that food and mental health were inextricably linked. However, despite living in a county known as a vegan mecca, I found the vegan community was not a fit for me because hardly anyone I encountered was interested in the connection between food and mental health.
The following year, while researching the ketogenic diet for my perimenopausal weight gain, I was excited to learn that a ketogenic diet for bipolar disorder existed. When I found out this diet could be done with a vegan approach, I was over the moon! I learned about the progressive subfield of metabolic psychiatry and landed on the groundbreaking Keto Bipolar podcast hosted by Matt Baszucki and Dr. Iain Campbell. (I was honoured to be a Keto Bipolar guest on the 23rd show.)
The Keto Bipolar lived experience interviews resonated deeply with me, and I listened to every episode. I discovered I lived only an hour away from the world’s first Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic at Stanford University founded by Dr. Shebani Sethi, who coined the term “metabolic psychiatry” and who ultimately became my psychiatrist.
I had finally found a community that incorporated my passion for using the ketogenic diet for mental health: the community of metabolic psychiatry. When I had the opportunity to join the Hub for Metabolic Psychiatry as a LEAP member, I jumped at the chance. It’s a thrill to be directly involved with one of the Hub’s six workstreams, collaborate with metabolic psychiatry visionaries, and contribute my lived experience to cutting-edge research. There is nothing quite like finding kindred spirits in your life, especially ones who understand the power of metabolic psychiatry. I’m deeply thankful to be a part of this mental health research community and to have finally found my village.
Dyane Harwood
Dyane Harwood graduated with a degree in English Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and she has been a freelance writer for three decades. In 2007, Dyane was diagnosed with postpartum bipolar 1 disorder. Her experience motivated her to eventually write the memoir Birth of a New Brain—Healing from Postpartum Bipolar Disorder, endorsed by Kay Redfield Jamison, Dr. Linda Gask, Dr. Verinder Sharma, et al. Dyane has been practicing a vegan ketogenic diet for bipolar disorder under the guidance of Dr. Shebani Sethi, Founding Director of the Stanford Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic. Dyane is a member of The Vegan Society Researcher Network, and she was selected as a Baszucki Group/Metabolic Mind Fresh Start Award Winner. Dyane is currently writing the book Birth of a Keto Brain—An Exploration of Metabolic Psychiatry surrounded by beautiful redwoods in Ben Lomond, California. Dyane lives with Craig, her husband of 24 years, their two daughters, and Lucy, their feisty Scottish collie.
Watch Dyane's Metabolic Mind THINK+SMART Metabolic Mental Health Journey Video