The latest fad: eating your way to better mental health

Which fad diet have you chosen to follow this year? One that helps you lose weight, or one that cures your mental health problems? Chances are that if you’re really following food trends, you’ll be discarding the piles of ‘clean eating’ recipe books in your kitchen in favour of a whole new swath of literature on dieting for mental health. There’s the ‘Mad Diet’, which promises ‘easy steps to lose weight and cure depression’, the ‘Anti-Anxiety Diet’, which is a ‘Whole-Body Programme to Stop Racing Thoughts, Banish Worry and Live Panic-Free’, or ‘Food and Mood: Eating Your Way Out of Depression’. Just like the clean eating trend that came before, each mental health diet has its own mantras. Gluten continues to be the biggest threat to sanity, according to many of these self–appointed psychiatric chefs, but there are also problems with dairy, sugar and fats. And like so many diets that require you to buy a book in order to understand them, the claims are impossibly big.

Of course, the food quacks aren’t the only ones cashing in on the current interest in mental health. It’s the new marketplace for people wanting to make a fast buck out of the fears of vulnerable consumers, just as fad diet proponents have been doing for years with those who are unhappy with their bodies. Everyone wants to lose a few pounds, and now that the stigma around common mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety is lifting, so everyone wants to have good mental health. And there are plenty of businesses hoping you’ll try to spend your way out of a mental black hole using their products. The amount of stuff available is so overwhelming — and expensive — that it’s a wonder people with mental illnesses have any time or money to do anything else at all.

As someone who has written a fair bit about mental illness after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder a few years ago, I find myself being bombarded with some of these products from people hoping I’ll give them a good write-up.