Kristina Bauer, a Lyme advocate, patient and mother of four children with congenital Lyme disease, is the founder of the Texas Lyme Alliance.

After she became interested in the use of disulfiram for treating Lyme disease, she started a Facebook support group called Disulfiram Experience for Lyme and a website called Disulfiram for Lyme.

The website features several video interviews with doctors and researchers about treating Lyme with disulfiram. In her latest one, she interviews psychiatrist Robert Bransfield MD, a leading expert on how Lyme disease affects the brain–and how he has found that disulfiram can help.

(Disulfiram, also known as Antabuse, was used for decades to help treat alcoholism. It has recently been repurposed to treat Lyme disease. Read more about the drug here.)

Dr. Bransfield is an expert on Lyme-related suicide. While no formal statistics are kept on what contributes to the 45,000 suicides per year in the United States, he estimates that some 1200 are likely attributable to depression and other brain manifestations that can result from chronic Lyme disease.

For over 30 years, he has treated Lyme patients who have psychiatric symptoms. Since 2018, he has put more than 60 of them on disulfiram, with good results.

Watch the interview here:

TOUCHED BY LYME is written by Dorothy Kupcha Leland, LymeDisease.org’s Vice-president and Director of Communications. She is co-author of When Your Child Has Lyme Disease: A Parent’s Survival Guide. Contact her at dleland@lymedisease.org.