NIMH · Mental Disorders as Brain Disorders: Thomas Insel at TEDxCaltech

Am wondering if murder, planning to murder, and domestic violence are brain disorders…
If so, or even probably so, this is a real wake up call for prison reform…

 

NIMH · Mental Disorders as Brain Disorders: Thomas Insel at TEDxCaltech.

From the 23 April 2013 item at the National Institute of Mental Health

A rethink is needed in terms of how we view mental illness, stated National Institute of Mental Health Director Thomas Insel, M.D., in a recent TEDx talkat the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.

Deaths from medical causes such as leukemia and heart disease have decreased over the past 30 years. The same cannot be said of the suicide rate, which has remained the same. A vast majority of suicides—90 percent—are related to mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia.

Insel believes part of the problem is that mental illness is referred to either as a mental or behavioral disorder. “We need to think of these as brain disorders,” he said, adding that for these brain disorders, behavior is the last thing to change.

Insel walked the audience through recent advances in neuroscience, including the Human Connectome, which indicates that mental illness may be more of a neuronal connection or circuit disorder. The earlier these circuits are identified, he said, the earlier preventive treatments could be used to save the lives of people with mental illnesses.

“If we waited for the ‘heart attack,’ we would be sacrificing 1.1 million lives every year in this country,” he said. “That is precisely what we do today when we decide that everyone with one of these brain disorders, brain circuit disorders, has a behavior disorder. We wait until the behavior emerges. That’s not early detection, that’s not early prevention.”

Related articles

• Toward A New Understanding of Mental Illness (thesecretkeeper.net)
• A Break From Politics: Toward a new understanding of mental illness (freakoutnation.com)
• Once, people suffering from a mental illness were hidden … (jillsmentalhealthresources.wordpress.com)
• What Does It Really Mean for Me to Have a Mental Illness? (thedancingwriterblog.wordpress.com)
• Vaughan Bell: news from the borders of mental illness (guardian.co.uk)
• Mental Health Awareness Month (irishdragon7.wordpress.com)
• Medical Brain Disorders~The Benefits of Exercise (keepchoosingconsistency.com)