In 2016, Matt Baszucki was a freshman in college and taking engineering classes when he began experiencing manic symptoms.
“It was like sleeping less and less, having grandiose thoughts, rapid speech,” Matt Baszucki, 27, told NBC’s Kate Snow in a segment aired Feb. 21. “Going, going, going, spending, talking fast, not sleeping, doing all this wild impulsive behavior.”
For years, Matt Baszucki grappled with treatment resistant bipolar disorder. Courtesy Baszucki Family
Soon after, doctors diagnosed Baszucki with bipolar disorder, and he was hospitalized. Over the next eight years, he took 29 different medications, visited 40 doctors and was eventually told his condition was treatment-resistant.
He and his family didn’t want to accept this, and they began looking for experts who help people with treatment-resistant forms of mental illness. They found Dr. Christopher Palmer at Harvard Medical School, who had an unusual suggestion to mange Matt Baszucki’s bipolar disorder: eating a ketogenic diet. After three years on the diet, Baszucki feels better.
“It was so shocking. I almost couldn’t believe it,” mom Jan Baszucki, president of the Baszucki group, which invests in research relating to metabolism, mental health and more, told Snow. “I kept saying to my husband, could this really be keto?”
Life with bipolar disorder
While Matt Baszucki experienced stress and anxiety around school, he didn’t really show any signs of bipolar disorder until he was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. His parents noticed their son seemed different after a weekend home. Then he dropped a class. Then they didn’t hear from him for a few days.
“His behavior was completely different from anything we’d ever encountered. It was hard to know. Well maybe … he’s 19, he’s changing. He’s growing,” Jan Baszucki said. “I Googled his symptoms, and it said, ‘Oh manic episode.’”
By March 2016, Matt Baszucki was in a psychiatric ward in the hospital, where he stayed for two weeks. Doctors diagnosed him with bipolar disorder and prescribed him medication. But he didn’t take it.
“I refused the meds,” he said. “That was a trend that…