David Anderson, a neurobiologist, agrees with Dr. Insel about the intense human suffering that many people are going through due to mental illnesses such as autism, depression and schizophrenia. They complain about the treatment that suspected diagnosis of depression receive (a questionnaire) in front of what suspected diagnosis of cancer get (a bunch of tests such as bone scans, blood tests, ...), and he stand up to get the reliability of the popular belief about treating mental illnesses wrong.
They denounce that our brains are treated like a kind of bag of chemicals in which we add meds in order to cure diseases, but we're doing it in rough outlines. Psychiatric disorders are actually disturbances of the neutral circuits that mediate emotion, mood and affect, and we're treating them like a lack of salt in our brain soup. In other words, we're treating a complex computer like a bag of assorted simple stuff.
Specific mental illnesses are located on some regions of our brains, so we have to focus on fixing that brain regions instead of pouring drugs all over the nervous system (If we need an oil change on a motor and we pour the oil all over the car, a little oil will end up where we want it), and that's causing awful side effects. Researches showed proof about that: some neurons are specifically designed to carry through explicit behaviours. Therefore, their manipulation can end up activating, destroying or inhibiting some processes. That can be easily done in fruit flies due to their simple brain structure, but that's a bit more difficult in humans, although it's possible.
The problem is that this study was made with fruit flies, but... Do animals have emotion-like states and/or complex mental disorders? Apparently, they do, and it's been proved since the 70s. But the puff-o-mat strenghten this theory with an experiment that delivered little brief air puffs to fruit flies put into lab's plastic tubes. As they kept recieving briefs, the flying period after the puff-o-mat stopped was longer, so it turned out something we could name as 'fruit fly hyperactivity'. That hyperactivity was persistent, long lasting and graded, which are the properties of emotion-like states. The experiment was done with mutant fruit flies as well, and it showed that some of them would need longer time to calm down. These mutations were located on dopamine receptors, so the scientists gave them cocaine, and they calmed down faster.
Not by chance, ADHD/ADD is caused by something we could name, using a non-scientifically accurate name, 'mutant dopamine receptors'. Flies can actually learn, and the hyperactive ones had learning disabilities, just like people who suffer from ADHD/ADD. The popular belief think that is the hyperactivity what causes the learning disability, but it comes out that that could be completely upside down: maybe it's the learning disability what causes the person to search for other things to focus their attention on because they aren't learning. But maybe they're independent factors.
Nowadays, dopamine is used to treat ADHD/ADD, but the meds that are given just pour the substance all over the brain soup instead of focusing on the areas that actually have a lack of dopamine to fix the disorder. Thus, we need a new generation of treatments that are targeted to specific neurons and specific regions of the brain that are affected in particular psychiatric disorders.
To sum up, we need more researches about the human brain in order to discover the cure to many complex mental disesases. Those researches should be focused as well on setting up new meds which should be more effective and have less side effects.
Silvia Pers
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