In recent years, personal experience and scientific evidence have begun to converge around a simple insight: mental health and metabolic health are deeply connected. From family stories of recovery to a rapidly expanding research base, metabolic psychiatry, a field centered on how metabolism influences brain function and mental health, is emerging as a new way to understand—and treat—serious mental illness.

That convergence signals something important: the field is moving into an implementation phase.

The question no longer is whether metabolism matters in mental health—but how to build the systems that make metabolic intervention accessible. We need care models that are clinically rigorous, patient-sustained, and that can scale. This transition from breakthrough discovery to universal access is where the real work of field-building begins.

At Baszucki Group and Metabolic Mind, our work is focused on helping lead this next chapter and accelerating the field’s transition from research to real-world delivery. Alongside funding research and education, we support teams that are building the clinical, digital, and operational foundations needed to deliver metabolic approaches—especially for people living with serious mental illness who have been left with too few effective options.

Why Delivery Infrastructure Matters

Delivering metabolic interventions requires more than publishing studies. Nutritional and metabolic therapies are high-touch, behavior-dependent, and deeply human. They require education, monitoring, personalization, and trust, often over extended periods of time.

Over the past several years, we’ve learned that the most durable care models thoughtfully blend human-delivered care with patient-facing digital tools, sometimes supported by AI. These hybrid approaches are best positioned to deliver high-quality care while still fitting within existing health system and payment constraints.

That insight shapes how we think about building and scaling this field.

Amae Health: Implementing Metabolic Psychiatry in High-Acuity Care

Amae Health offers a clear example of what metabolic psychiatry can look like in practice for people with serious mental illness.

Amae is a psychiatry-led outpatient care provider specializing in conditions such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and severe depression. Their clinics deliver whole-person care through multidisciplinary teams that integrate psychiatry, therapy, care coordination, and increasingly, metabolic approaches.

Baszucki Group supported an early pilot at Amae exploring ketogenic therapy for individuals with serious mental illness. Building on those learnings, Amae is now planning a larger study expanding this work to 100 participants, designed to better understand feasibility, outcomes, and implementation within a real-world clinical setting.

With clinics in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, New York City, and Raleigh, and additional sites underway, Amae represents a promising model for integrating metabolic psychiatry into high-acuity care environments where need is greatest and operational complexity is real.

Meru Health: Scaling Access Through Hybrid Digital Care

If Amae represents depth, Meru Health represents reach.

Meru is a virtual mental health clinic offering an evidence-based, 12-week program that combines licensed therapist support, digital lessons grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness, and biofeedback via wearable technology. Their model has already demonstrated strong clinical outcomes and broad payer adoption.

Our support of Meru focuses on the launch of a ketogenic therapy component within their Meru Advanced program. This initiative is designed to expand access to metabolic interventions beyond specialty clinics, reaching a broader population through a hybrid digital-care model.

In parallel, Meru is helping nucleate a pilot study to better understand outcomes, adherence, and implementation considerations for ketogenic therapy delivered virtually. This work explores how metabolic psychiatry might scale responsibly without sacrificing clinical rigor.

Building the Ecosystem Around Care

Care delivery does not exist in isolation. Metabolic psychiatry also requires tools that support personalization, monitoring, and engagement.

That’s why our broader ecosystem includes efforts like Metabolic Psychiatry Labs, a digital clinic built around metabolic-first psychiatric care; KetoTap, a non-invasive ketone monitoring tool that provides real-time metabolic feedback; and NeuroVitals, a platform integrating behavioral data with biomarkers to make mental health care more adaptive and measurable.

In addition, we support scholarship programs that expand access to metabolic treatment for individuals with serious mental illness who would otherwise be unable to afford care, including partnerships with organizations such as MH², Accord, and Brain Fog Recovery Source. These scholarships help ensure that financial barriers do not prevent patients from accessing emerging metabolic interventions.

Together, these efforts address practical challenges clinicians face every day: identifying candidates, tracking response, and sustaining meaningful change over time.

Why This Moment Matters

Demand for mental health care continues to grow as stigma falls and awareness rises. At the same time, digital health technologies—accelerated by telehealth adoption and advances in AI—have reached a level of capability and acceptance that makes new care models possible.

Policy and reimbursement dynamics remain complex, but momentum toward outcomes-oriented care is unmistakable. Metabolic psychiatry, with its potential for durable improvements in both mental and metabolic health, aligns naturally with this shift—even if implementation requires new pathways and partnerships.

This combination of scientific readiness and mounting pressure on health systems to improve outcomes while managing rising costs and complexity makes the current moment pivotal.

An Invitation to Build Together

Metabolic psychiatry will not advance through research alone. Scientific breakthroughs require a delivery system ready to translate them into care. We aren’t just funding studies; we are building the clinical and operational backbone metabolic psychiatry needs to reach those who need it most.

For the Behavioral Health Tech community, this is an opportunity to help shape a new category of care—one that addresses root causes, expands access, and offers real hope to people who have exhausted traditional options.

This is how a field moves from insight to impact.

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Article written by Cristina Nigro, PhD, MS, Senior Policy and Partnerships Officer at Baszucki Group.