The way we approach Mental Health today is broken beyond repair. The question is, what comes next, and how fast can we get there?

The hidden links between mental disorders (Nature): In 2018, psychiatrist Oleguer Plana-Ripoll was wrestling with a puzzling fact about mental disorders. He knew that many individuals have multiple conditions — anxiety and depression, say, or schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He wanted to know how common it was to have more than one diagnosis, so he got his hands on a database containing the medical details of around 5.9 million Danish citizens. He was taken aback by what he found. Every single mental disorder predisposed the patient to every other mental disorder — no matter how distinct the symptoms. “We knew that comorbidity was important, but we didn’t expect to find associations for all pairs,” says Plana-Ripoll, who is based at Aarhus University in Denmark. The study tackles a fundamental question that has bothered researchers for more than a century. What are the roots of mental illness? … The idea that mental illness can be classified into distinct, discrete categories such as ‘anxiety’ or ‘psychosis’ has been disproved to a large extent. Instead, disorders shade into each other, and there are no hard dividing lines — as Plana-Ripoll’s study so clearly demonstrated… As a result, the world’s largest funder of mental-health science, the US National Institute of Mental Health, changed the way it funded research. Beginning in 2011, it began demanding more studies of the biological basis of disorders, instead of their symptoms, under a progra...
Source: SharpBrains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Cognitive Neuroscience Health & Wellness Technology anxiety biological bipolar-disorder depression Genetics JAMA Psychiatry mental illness mental-disorders National-Institute-of-Mental-Health neuroanatomy psychopathology Resear Source Type: blogs