Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

Have you ever read the DSM and thought you had EVERYTHING? Me too.

And that, sort of,  has always been a big problem … that it is really hard to separate the normal experience of anguish and suffering as part of our everyday mental and emotional lives from what is labelled a “disorder”. At the same time, however, patients, doctors and payors need some type of common reference so as to keep the diagnosis and treatment of mental suffering in-line with the way other medical illnesses are handled. So, everyone (in psychiatry, at least) knows the DSM will always be highly flawed and yet also highly necessary … so, you know, just try and live with it … but don’t expect, for a moment, to search for and find discrete genetic variants that correspond to DSM categories of mental disorders. No … because the DSM categories do not correspond well to the underlying biology of the CNS … the DSM does not “cut nature at its joints” so to speak.

Russ Poldrack provides a glimpse into what the future of diagnosing mental illness might look like using slightly more objective, quantifiable and biologically relevant measures of the brain’s physiological processes.

Also, I stumbled onto an awesome read about the creation of DSM-5 entitled, The Book of Woe

The overall thrust of the manual [DSM-5], the BPS complained, was to identify the source of psychological suffering “as located within individuals” rather than in their “relational context,” and to overlook the “undeniable social causation of many such problems.”  The APA could hardly deny any of this. As Regier had told the consumer groups on the conference call, the manual’s new organizational structure was designed to reflect “what we’ve learned about the brain, behavior, and genetics during the past two decades.” It doesn’t get much more “within the individual” and outside the “relational context” than that. (p. 239)

“Dereification is just as dumb as reinfication,” he [Allen Frances] told me. “A construct is just a construct – not to be worshiped and not to be denigrated.” Psychiatry, he was saying, has to live in the tension between the desire for certainty about the nature of our suffering and the impossibility of understanding it (or ourselves) completely. A DSM that tries to end this tension by turning itself into a living document was bound to collapse into chaos; that was the cardinal error of the incompetent DSM-5 regime. (p. 279)

“What [Dr. Thomas] Insel [Director of NIMH] heard “over and over again” on his tour was that psychiatrists were tired of being trapped by the DSM. “We are so embedded in this structure,” he told me. He and his colleagues had spent so much time diagnosing mental disorders that “we actually believe they are real. But there’s no reality. These are just constructs. There’s no reality to schizophrenia and depression.” Indeed, Insel said, “we might have to stop using terms like depression and schizophrenia, because they are getting in our way, confusing things.” Thirty years after Spitzer burned down DSM-II and built the DSM-III in its ashes, psychiatry might once again have to “just sort of start over.”” (p.340)

Yikes! after reading The Book of Woe, DSM-5 sounds, um, totally wack … if not a tool flagrantly designed to further commodify human suffering for the benefit of a medico-industrial complex. NIMH Director Thomas Insel’s recent announcement that, “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” suggests a future where diagnosis will based on biological measures and treatments are directed toward specific circuits.

Treatment for specific circuit dynamics sounds very promising. However, I thought Dr. Allen Frances, as quoted in The Book of Woe made a great point (p.346) that, “The trick is to develop a healing relationship, to care for the person not just the disorder, to diagnose and treat cautiously, and to see the healthy part of the person not just the sick.”

* Maybe that is the hope of this blog also … to take out and explore the intricate biological & molecular parts … but also to try and place them back into their original evolutionary, living, breathing, copulating (or more often the case of just thinking about copulating) “whole” human being.