Is there a single 'mental illness' for which a cure has been found? Why is psychiatry so lagging in this regard compared to the rest of medicine?
If I had to guess, I would say that it's the lack of clearly defined physiological pathologies with mental illness that is holding the field back. While there are very realizable effects when it comes to medications, this is partly because we know what we need to affect within the brain to get the results we want, but not always what is causing the pathology. For instance, in disorders like ADHD (>implying it's real) we have ideas that the source of inattentiveness stems from dopamine receptor inactivation in the Basal Ganglia. However, we would never be able to take a healthy human and lesion their basal ganglia based on a theory. It's impossible for us to know whether environmental factors cause ADHD symptoms or whether it's solely the biology, or perhaps a combination of both.
In addition, we cannot advance the field of psychiatry medically until we understand the brain completely. Neuroscience is still a relatively new field, and we still don't fully
comprehend everything we need to fully understand how physiological changes produce all behavioral
effects.
Another thing you will find frustrating is that mental disorders and illnesses can be caused from many different things and usually a disease is rather a subset of associates symptoms that really can manifest from many different causes, like Autism. There is strong evidence that Autism is a gender based hereditary disease caused by specific gene mutations, due to its particular prevalence in men. This would suggest that it is carried on the X chromosome, as men only have 1 copy. Now, researchers have found genes they believe to cause Autism, and there is a lot of evidence supporting their hypothesis. However, there are many people who are symptomatic that do not have the aforementioned genetic mutation.
All of this combined with relatively wide criterion for diagnosing mental illness makes mental illness easier to manage than cure. Just my thoughts on my way to work, you may disagree.
>>7929018
Another thought I have on this is that there is no real way to surgically cure mental illness, at least with the technology we have today. I suppose we could lesion out the parts of the brain that cause the illness, but that's if we could even localize the illness or prove that it's the sole factor in causing it. We know that people who suffer from clinical depression have different activations in their frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex, the center of higher reasoning In the brain. But it's not that simple, as it doesn't do the job alone. Furthermore, we can't just take the frontal lobe out of someone without horrible effects. This leaves medication and therapies such as deep brain stimulation as our only currently viable options.
>>7929018
Interesting view.
My own opinion is basically that while the mind is obviously correlated with the goings on in the brain, it is in fact an information system and thus can't be treated as a purely mechanical one as you can with the rest of the body. This for me seems like it could explain the discrepancy in results between psychiatry and the rest of medicine despite them using basically similar approaches.
The analogy I would pick would be that it's like trying to fix your windows install by dipping your hard drive in a chemical bath.
i like brains
>>7929032
Yeah, for a while there we neuro-psychiatry combined residencies, but it was found that you couldn't treat most psychiateic illnesses from a purely biology based view.
There are many problems facing psychiatry at the moment, but at the root of it all is the simple fact that we don't understand anything.
If we were to treat Liver disease like we treat psychiatric disorders we would still be trying to treat "jaundice" as a disease and getting nowhere. We don't have anything even resembling understanding for a single psychiatric illness (and don't sell me the serotonergic theory, no one buys it anymore). To be frank, the mental disorders themselves are generally poorly defined and not correlated to actual physical phenomena but rather serve as behavioral labels which allow us to discuss these issues in a uniform manner.
>>7929018
>>7929031
Very well put. I would mention in this context the Human Brain Project (and the american BRAIN initiative which is much more modest but shares the same general gist) which are expected to create models for psychiatric diseases in 10-20 years. Hopefully this will revolutionize the way we see psychiatry.
>>7929018
An insightful and well thought out post.
It's like finding a diamond in the rough.
> muh can't into mechanism of disease
>>7930385
I assume you are trying to mock other users for not understanding psychiatric pathogenesis? Because I am pretty sure there's a reason the DSM doesn't give pathogenesis unlike any other medical guidelines in any other field.
>>7929031
>no real way to surgically cure mental illness
We're getting there.
http://news.emory.edu/stories/2015/04/hspub_brain_hacking_depression/campus.html
http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/transcranial-magnetic-stimulation/details/why-its-done/icc-20163838
>>7930399
yes, that reason is because it's a it's a statistically derived manual of symptoms that make up what clinically amounts to a simulation of x-given-disease-state. that's not what it is designed for. basically pathology is outside of the dsm-v's scope.
>>7930466
Absolutely agreed, so I can't really understand your first post
Mmmm... brains. Yummy!
>>7929018
Autism isn't a mental disorder, it's a neurological disorder.
>>7928993
>Why is psychiatry lagging so far behind the rest of medicine?
Because the brain is staggeringly more complex than any other part of the body. Ever tried to debug code? If so, then you know that if you try to fix one little thing a load of other things can go wrong. The brain is like this but worse.
>>7928993
hmm maybe because we interpret mental illness as an illness and not expression of others' consciousness. it's rather disturbing that Hawking states humans and animals are consciousless and are nothing more than deterministic robots, thus justifying genocide and population control. big bang spontaneous creation is folly without a god figure
>>7930883
Lol gtfo
My sides
I suppose I was cured of OCD
>>7930896
Nah many people recover without treatment.
>>7930466
>statistically derived manual of symptoms
practically its a consensus based manual, dont even need statistical in the title
>>7928993
tl;dr
we're working on it be patient
and give us more funding to work on it ffs
if the amount of money given to physical health was given to mental health, and mental health science started before the 1800's we may have been not lagging
>>7931147
>more money
S-so you can pump out new drug regimens?
![70044-Metal_Slug_2_(1998)(SNK)(Jp)[!]-1.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/FRT9IWg.jpg "70044-Metal_Slug_2_(1998)(SNK)(Jp)[!]-1.jpg")
i know a method to cure schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder / self harming/ ADHD
it's simple and only takes a couple of minutes without any drug so far. it works in any case that doesn't got its symptoms from a pathological background.
