Week 10
This week’s topic on the Structure and Operation of the Human Brain course was mental illness. The book and lecture covered the basics symptoms of the most common psychiatric disorders and the physiological mechanisms that contribute to their inception. This week’s exercise focused on central nervous system (CNS) disorders and a reaction time experiment.
Understanding the physiological basis of mental illnesses is necessary to development focused treatments for the diseases. I had previously heard that mental illnesses are indeed connected with brain function. This week’s lecture and book chapter provided a great introduction to the topic. We learned about the physiological basis of stress responses and the blood cortisol regulation by amygdala and hippocampus as well as the basic mechanisms of drugs that affect the feedback loop. However, despite advances in biological treatments for mental illnesses, it is clear that the global burden caused by them is far from solved. Hence, it would be interesting to hear expert opinions about the future prospects of molecular medicine for mental illnesses, as well as potential new approaches such as cortical stimulation in-development by Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
Because the mental illnesses are so various itself, it was instructive to get a clearer picture how these different diseases are classified. The most unfamiliar of the introduced mental illnesses was agoraphobia even though about 5 % of the population suffer from it. The percentages of how many people suffer from each mental disorder varied from 1 to 5 percentage. However, in most of these disorders, majority of the patients were women. It would be quite interesting to study the reasons behind this discrepancy.
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