Dr. Malcolm Noell McLeod, MD
Dr. Malcolm Noell McLeod, MD is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and clinical researcher who has been in private practice in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for more than 35 years. He is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine, where he has supervised residents in psychiatry for 30 years.
McLeod is a graduate of the University of North Carolina (UNC), the UNC School of Medicine, and the UNC-Duke Psychoanalytic Education Program. He is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst Emeritus at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Carolinas and the Psychoanalytic Education Center of the Carolinas.
In the course of his practice, Dr. McLeod serendipitously discovered that chromium can help alleviate food cravings, especially craving for carbohydrates. Because craving carbs is a prominent symptoms in atypical depression, premenstrual syndrome, winter blues (seasonal affective disorder or SAD) and daily mood variations, chromium may offer help to some people who suffer from these conditions. McLeod conducted single-blind trials that supported his initial observations. The US Patent Office affirmed the originality of his discoveries by granting him patents that cover the use of chromium alone and in combination with antidepressant medications for depression, PMS, diurnal mood variation, and winter blues.*
McLeod applied for — and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved — an Investigational New Drug (IND) application number 54,951 for use of chromium in depression research. Afterwards, McLeod extended his clinical research by including teams of investigators at the University of North Carolina Department of Psychiatry, the Duke University Medical Center, and Comprehensive Neuroscience. The Institutional Review Boards at UNC and Duke approved the research projects.
The results of McLeod’s research have been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology.
McLeod’s discoveries have generated much interest in the academic world of psychiatry. With the hope of reaching a broader audience, McLeod wrote a book on his discoveries titled Lifting Your Depression.
