Practitioner Course

Metabolic Psychiatry

Learn how metabolism, brain energy and mitochondrial function influence serious mental health conditions, and what you can do to help your patients.
Format

Online Course
1 lesson

Availability

12 Months OR Subscriber Pass

Duration

1 hour total

Presenter

Zoltan Sarnyai

About this interview

Mental illness has long been understood through the lens of neurotransmitter imbalance, yet a growing body of evidence points to a deeper story, one rooted in metabolism, brain energy and mitochondrial function. This conversation challenges conventional model and opens up a genuinely different way of thinking about serious mental health conditions.
Zoltan Sarnyai is a neuroscientist and psychiatry researcher whose work focuses on the metabolic underpinnings of conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression.

Zoltan uses the concept of Metabolic Psychiatry to describe an approach that goes well beyond symptom management and addresses the core biological drivers of psychiatric illness, including impaired glucose handling, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress and disrupted brain bioenergetics.

In this interview, Zoltan explains why metabolic problems, including insulin resistance and obesity, are present in patients with serious mental illness before they ever take an antipsychotic, and what this tells us about the underlying pathophysiology. He then walks us through the evidence for ketogenic and other metabolic therapies, from animal models and pilot trials through to his own current randomised controlled trial in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

This is a thoughtful, evidence-grounded conversation that will change how you think about the metabolic health of mental health patients and open up some new clinical possibilities.
What you receive:
  • A personalised certificate of completion including continuing education hours
  • Clear protocol explanations from some of the world's top practitioners
  • Clinical pearls for improved practice results
  • Access to your audio and video recordings via the App Store
  • A downloadable PDF of the presenter’s slides
  • Links to all referenced research papers and useful clinical handouts
  • Access to the community hub where you can get answers to your questions

From this interview you will learn

  • What metabolic psychiatry means and how it differs from the neurotransmitter-focused model of mental illness
  • Why schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses involve impaired metabolic flexibility and what this looks like clinically
  • How metabolic dysfunction, including insulin resistance and mitochondrial impairment, precedes antipsychotic exposure in many patients
  • The key biological mechanisms linking metabolic dysfunction to psychiatric symptoms
  • What the animal model and early clinical data on ketogenic therapy in psychosis and mood disorders show
  • How to identify patients who may be good candidates for metabolic interventions and who may not respond
  • Which minimum metabolic assessments to run for every patient with serious mental illness
  • How to explain metabolic risk and brain energy issues to patients and families in a way that motivates change
  • First-step metabolic interventions for busy clinicians who cannot run a full ketogenic protocol
  • How to coordinate dietary changes alongside psychotropic medications safely
  • Which symptom domains respond best to metabolic interventions and what functional improvements to expect

What's in this course

Your Presenter

Dr. Zoltán Sarnyai MD, PhD

Dr. Zoltán Sarnyai is a distinguished neuroscientist specialising in the neurobiology of stress and the emerging field of metabolic psychiatry. He currently serves as the Professor of Pharmacology and Head of the Laboratory of Psychiatric Neuroscience at James Cook University in Australia. He is also the Director of the Margaret Roderick Centre for Mental Health Research.

Dr. Sarnyai’s career spans prestigious institutions across several continents. He earned his medical degree and doctorate from the Albert Szent-Györgyi Medical University in Hungary and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. He also held an independent research position at The Rockefeller University. Before moving to Australia in 2012, he was a University Lecturer in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College, where he served as the Director of Studies for Medicine.

In 2019, he was appointed the Lady Davis Visiting Professor to study the neurometabolic aspects of schizophrenia at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. With over 150 publications and more than 10,000 citations, Dr. Sarnyai is a leading authority on how physiological stress and metabolic factors influence brain health. His early group described the roles of oxytocin and corticotropin-releasing factor in drug addiction, work for which he received the Richter Prize from the International Society of Psychoneuroendocrinology.

He has pioneered the study of ketogenic metabolic therapy for serious mental illnesses. He discovered the efficacy of ketogenic diets in preclinical models and is currently leading randomised controlled clinical trials to investigate these therapies in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
He serves as the Associate Editor for the journals Nutritional Neuroscience and Frontiers in Neuroscience. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research.
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