Researchers have shown before that low vitamin D levels are
linked with psychiatric disorders like major depression. Now, a
presentation at the annual meeting of the American Academy of
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry signals the importance of
testing those who suffer from psychotic symptoms—delusions
(fixed and false beliefs) and hallucinations—for vitamin D
deficiency. A group of researchers led by Dr. Barbara L.
Gracious, a psychiatrist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in
Columbus, Ohio, presented data at that meeting showing that
adolescents who were vitamin D deficient showed a fourfold (400
percent) increased rate of psychotic symptoms, compared to other
adolescents with normal vitamin D levels who sought psychiatric
treatment at the University of Rochester, in New York. In other
words, in the group of adolescents asking for psychiatric help
that Gracious studied, low vitamin D was very, very powerfully
connected to the likelihood that they would report symptoms like
delusions (like paranoia) or hearin