Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Alaka Halder Despite the abundance of claims by quacks that gluten is to blame for a medley of mental health problems, the actual evidence is more subtle. One thing to understand about mental disorders is that there is a tendency to classify conditions on the basis of their symptoms, and not necessarily the causes. This is because the underlying causes are poorly understood. Hence even though two people might have the symptoms of "bipolar disorder", the underlying causes might be very different, and hence different modes of treatment might help the patients. I prefer to think of words like like "schizophrenia", "bipolar disorder", "ADHD", etc. as umbrella terms for symptoms, and not "diseases" in the conventional sense. So it's impossible to say if gluten "exacerbates", say, schizophrenia -- because this isn't even one precise "disease" like malaria and influenza, for which we can pinpoint the disease agent/cause. I'll discuss some of the evidence... - Meryn Stol