Peptides, Ketamine, and the Truth About Mental Health
In a conversation with International Business Times’ Visionary Voices series, Nikita Tsimmer, co-founder of Fountain Health, and Dr. Doreen Zarfati, the company’s chief medical officer, argue that American mental health care is fundamentally broken because it treats the brain as if it’s floating in the skull, disconnected from everything else.
Fountain Health runs over 100 biomarkers on every patient, repeats them quarterly, and builds care plans around what the blood says rather than what the patient reports. It’s a simple concept that almost nobody in psychiatry actually does.
“In traditional psychiatry, a patient comes in and reports symptoms, and then you treat them with medicine,” says Dr. Doreen Zarfati.
“What we do is take all of those symptoms and then do a thorough blood test. We want to understand how the biology of the person is contributing to these symptoms.”
Two People With Anxiety. Two Completely Different Causes.
Tsimmer framed the structural problem with an example that makes the one-size-fits-all model look absurd.
“Somebody that has anxiety, one person’s anxiety is driven by lack of sleep, or maybe they have issues with their cortisol. Another person’s could be driven by obesity, or maybe they are metabolically sick.
In mental health care today, both of those patients would have a very similar care plan with their biology being completely ignored.
– Nikita Tsimmer / Co-Founder, Fountain Health
Dr. Zarfati shared a case from the day before our interview: a patient whose standard diabetes screening came back normal, but whose inflammation and insulin resistance scores were among the highest she’d ever seen. No traditional physician would have caught it. The patient is in her twenties.
ChatGPT Is Not Your Psychiatrist. But It’s Not Useless Either.
Dr. Zarfati’s take on patients using AI for mental health was surprisingly pragmatic.
“Rather than trying to find your diagnosis, use these AI tools to say, what should I ask my doctor?” says Dr. Zarfati.
“What should I be looking for? It can give you a really good tool for knowing what to ask, but it can’t really give you the full picture.”
The Future Is One Roof, Not Five Referrals
Fountain Health is building toward a model where psychiatry, psychology, endocrinology, primary care, nutrition, strength training, and executive coaching all operate under a single care team with shared data and a unified plan.
“Our patients tell us they’re getting conflicting advice from three different providers. Our goal is one care model, one unified team.”
– Nikita Tsimmer / Co-Founder, Fountain Health
Hippocrates once said the best doctor is a philosopher. These two are building a practice around the idea that the best psychiatrist might be the one who orders a blood panel before writing a prescription.
About Our Visionary Voices
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Nikita Tsimmer is the co-founder of Fountain Health. Before founding the company, he worked in real estate finance at Santander Corporate & Investment Banking, where he helped build the bank’s U.S. real estate securitization platform. His path into mental health was shaped by losing friends to overdose and suicide growing up in New York City.
Dr. Doreen Zarfati is the Chief Medical Officer at Fountain Health with 20 years of experience in psychiatry, including emergency psychiatry and addiction psychiatry. She bridges psychiatry, neurology, and metabolic health to treat the biological and psychological drivers of disease together.
