A Milestone in Mental Health

This article discusses a major change in how mental disorders may be handled in our country. The National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH) announced that it would be rejecting the fifth addition of Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  For a long time now, the DSM has been the cornerstone of how mental illness was diagnosed and treated in this country. It wasn't perfect. In fact, over the years it has listed various things that were less mental illness and more 'we don't approve of this as a society' things, such as homosexuality.

NIMH stated various reasons for their rejection of the DSM. For one, they believe that it is basically used as a tool to sell medication. Big Pharma has a lot of influence in the mental health industry, as we sell a lot of pills to a lot of people to keep them stable. NIMH also questions the nature of some of the 'disorders' listed, such as those that still define various sexual life choices as 'deviant.'

Their main reason for the rejection seems to stem from the fact that most diagnostic  aspects of mental illness are based on observations and assumptions, not on tangible, provable data. They believe studying brain scans and biochemical makeup would be more scientific. Treatment via hard science and alterations in the body would work better than the softer science approaches.

I'm not really sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I see the danger in Big Pharma having too much of a hand in how mental illness is defined. After all, their goals are less about helping people to get well and more about making a lot of money. I also like the idea of mental health being studied and treated in the same kind of hard science way as anything else.

However . . . mental illness is far more complex than most other types of science. If I have cancer, with any luck, it can be treated. The cancerous area is removed, chemo happens, you get better. Physical illness is pretty straightforward. Illness in the mind or emotions, however, isn't as tangible.

Some people are mentally ill because of physical things. They have a chemical imbalance. This imbalance CAN be proven using scientific methods and treated to restore this balance. Other people are mentally ill because they have been traumatized. Things happened to them that led to the mental breakdown. Could this illness be detected via a brain scan? Possibly. Could it be treated by doing something to alter the brain back to the physical condition of 'normal?' Perhaps one day that can happen.

However . . . treatment will not alter the fact that this person had something happen in their lives so horrible that it caused a breakdown. PTSD can cause a lot of damage in a person's life and PTSD is caused by something being pretty messed up in our lives. I'm not sure science can do a lot to alter how you process that.

With mental illness, I think we have to accept it's not just a physical malfunction. It's also not just a mental one. It isn't just about your emotional state and it isn't just about how you function in relation to other people. Mental illness is quite often tied to all of these things at once. Our minds are vastly complex. Any treatment of the mind has to respect that complexity.