MENTAL D I S O R D E R S:

WHY SCIENCE STILL CAN’T SOLVE MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS?

COULD “DISEASE-IN-A DISH” MODELING OF MENTAL DISORDERS PROVIDE A SOLUTION?

“ The care of human mind is the most noble branch of medicine.”  -  Aloysius Sieffert

                                                                               PART  I.

I am not a Neuropsychiatrist or Molecular Biologist but I live with a son who suffers from schizoaffective bipolar disorder for almost  20 years. It is not easy to live with a person who has disordered thoughts and a devastating mental disorder. It puts excessive physical, psychological and financial burdens on every member of the family.  This situation made me very curious about mental disorders and every aspects of mental health care. That is why, I believe I am entitled to express my humble opinion and raise my critical questions about mental health care in the USA.

It is very unfortunate that after the closure of state mental hospitals, mental health care in the USA has significantly deteriorated. With the discovery of effective antipsychotic drugs, patients with serious mental illnesses were no longer considered dangerous to themselves and to the people around them. Therefore, it was prematurely assumed that very costly state mental hospitals were no longer needed. Instead, mental health care could be delivered in outpatient mental health clinics, in private offices of psychiatrists and in patients’ own family home.

However mental health care in these places couldn’t replace or remedy the closure of mental hospitals, as claimed. Practically all mentally ill patients are abandoned, and left to their tragic fate by the government and politicians. Consequently the majority of these patients end up in jail, forced to become homeless or to become a burden on their family.

Today, suicide and homicide rates dramatically increased among mentally ill; at least 20% of them are jailed and one third of them become homeless. These places have no trained personal to take care of patients who suffer from severe mental illness. Available antipsychotic drugs only partly and symptomatically control the psychotic episodes of the disease but with serious side effects like blocking satiety feelings and causing the continuous urge to eat, morbid obesity, diabetes, hypertension, metabolic syndrome and tremors. These drugs don’t cure the disease, have no effects on cognitive dysfunction and disrupt social/ interpersonal relationships of the disease. 

It is time for the government and politicians to learn from their mistakes.  As I see it, for a real psychiatric care revolution to occur in the USA, all psychiatrist doctors need to start to concentrate, not just prescribing medications but also taking charge and start advocating for the human rights of the mentally ill. Long term mental health care of severely ill patients needs to be handed back to long term workers – nurses, counselors and social workers, in a controlled hospital environment. As well as also trying to convince the politicians that this will be less costly and more humane than closing all psychiatric hospitals.

It is unfortunate that despite billions of dollars research funding there is still no major breakthrough in our understanding and better treatment for mental disorders. 

I believe that the main reason behind this failure is the immense complexity of human brain. With its  most complex anatomical, cellular and bio-molecular structures and functions, we still don’t know how the mind is created.  By the same token, we don’t know how the mind creates consciousness. What are emotions, feelings, memory, cognition, decision making, learning, intelligence, wisdom, et cetera, et cetera? Mental disorders must be the Devil, hiding behind these complexities.

All mental processes are biological. Therefore, novel and different scientific methods are needed to study the complexities of the human brain and its biological functions.  These functions only could be studied on living specimens. However there is no laboratory animal model to study the human brain disorders. What could be done in this regard? We will discuss the answers to this question in part II and Part III of my article coming soon to the blog.