FEED YOUR HEAD: What causes mental illness? Are we, indeed, what we eat? Psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond met in Saskatchewan in 1951, and embarked on a quest to find what psychiatry said didn't exist: a cure for schizophrenia. Hoffer and Osmond set out to prove that the symptoms of schizophrenia could be controlled with healthy, unprocessed food and large doses of vitamins. 60 years later, it looks like they may have been right.