Hilary, a 39-year-old in California, has had depression for about as long as she can remember, which means she’s tried a lot of antidepressants. Mostly, though, the meds left her unimpressed.
Last year, she started taking the GLP-1 medication Wegovy to lose weight. Right away, she felt some of her sadness lifting. After months on a GLP-1, she felt like her entire outlook had become more positive. No one was more surprised than Hilary. “I didn’t even know it was possible for GLP-1s to have a positive effect on mental illness until it happened to me,” she says.
Hilary had accidentally stumbled into a cutting edge—and somewhat controversial—corner of psychiatry. In recent years a growing number of doctors have acknowledged that what you eat can affect how you feel, giving rise to the world of food therapy and nutritional psychiatry. Now a small group is taking that concept further, betting that GLP-1s, medications that have fundamentally changed how Americans eat, may also have major benefits for mental health.
Since well before everyone was on Ozempic, research published in journals like Translational Psychiatry and Diabetes Care has shown that health issues including obesity, high blood sugar, poor gut health, and chronic inflammation often go along with mental illness. When people improve their diets, their mental health sometimes gets better—perhaps because some of those physical health issues improve, translating to benefits for the brain. When about 20 people with depression cut back on processed foods for a month, they felt happier and less anxious, according to an experiment published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Psychiatry in September.
Providers like Joanna Buck, a Wisconsin psychiatrist, have started using brain-friendly diets as a supplement to traditional therapy. “More than just taking a pill or taking a medication or an injection, [a dietary approach] can really provide benefits to the person as a whole,” Buck says.
GLP-1s have a profound effect on weight, metabolic health, and inflammation, beyond what many people can accomplish with diet changes alone. Could these drugs supercharge the effects of nutritional psychiatry? Some doctors think so.
Thomas Rutledge, who spent more than two decades as a University of California, San Diego professor and in-house psychologist for a California Veteran Affairs weight-control clinic, thinks it’s possible. He noticed an obvious change in his patients when GLP-1s began sweeping the nation. They were typically using the medications for weight loss or diabetes treatment, but sometimes getting more than they bargained for, including “life-changing” mental health benefits. “We had people who responded tremendously, better than they had to any psychiatric medicine or psychotherapy they’d ever tried,” he says.