A friend of mine has/had extremely severe bipolar I. She was in and out of psychiatric hospitals fairly regularly. She would have intense manic states with extremely alarming psychosis. She also had dissociative identity disorder (I think) in which she would dissociate out of herself for hours to weeks at a time, becoming another personality entirely. When she came back she would have no idea what had happened or where she had been - it was very frightening.
However she is now virtually recovered. This process began a few years back when she stopped taking her meds because she hated how they made her feel. Soon after that she had MAJOR idiopathic swelling in her abdomen - she looked like she was 9 months pregnant. After being told multiple times by her GP that her swelling was there because she was depressed (?!?), she ultimately had to be taken to hospital by ambulance because of the extent of swelling and pain. She had multiple intrusive investigations but the doctors were ultimately unable to identify the cause of the swelling. She became allergic to a number of different foods, including nuts and peanuts, and at one point almost died from anaphylactic shock.
She started eating according to how food impacted on her abdominal swelling. I have quizzed her on this, but the foods she ate do not really line up to any of the popularly known diets like SCD, Paleo, raw vegan, etc - she was simply guided by the obvious and almost immediate impact of how various foods affected her abdominal symptoms. Also we could not make a connection amongst the foods that caused swelling - they do not appear to fall into any particular food group or, to our knowledge, share any nutritional characteristics. At that point it was not clear to her that there was any connection between her gut and her bipolar.
Ultimately the swelling went down, and as it did her psychiatric symptoms improved markedly. Last I checked, she was down to 2 personalities from about 8 or 9, and has not suffered from a manic, hypo-manic or major depressive episode for about 2 years. She used to hallucinate constantly, but that is now gone and she was telling me not long ago how amazing it is to be able to hear the birds singing.
At present, if she eats gluten she gets a major resurgence in her bipolar symptoms (primarily hallucinations and paranoia) and her abdomen begins to swell again. That lasts for a few days to a week but will return to normal if she sorts her diet out. It was only after a few relapses that I managed to demonstrate to her the connection between gluten and her relapses. That connection is now as clear to her as the light of day; there is simply no room for doubt; it has been tested repeatedly.
