Mental Illness Is Brain Illness

You voted, and this December, we are talking nerdy about the science of mental health. In last week's video introduction, I stated that "we now know that the mind does not exist somewhere outside of the brain. Consciousness is a function of neurobiology, and mental illness cannot be separated from biochemistry." This appears to be a point of contention for many readers. For example, commenter pittelli writes that:

Commenter Bellanova responds:

Before we can engage in a meaningful conversation about the science of mental health, we must ensure that we're operating with similar definitions of its associated terms.

The Mind-Brain Problem
When it comes to conversations about the human mind, arguments like the one between pittelli and Bellanova are neither new nor unexpected. Indeed, they are manifestations of a debate between dualists and monists, which dates back to the 17th century.

Dualism is a view that was popularized by the philosopher Renee Descartes. He claimed that the mind (soul or spirit) and the brain (or the body) are two separate entities, and although they may interact, they exist independently. This view further posits that the brain is a material entity, and because of this, it warrants scientific investigation. The mind, however, is an immaterial entity. In this view, since science is the study of the natural world, and the mind is a supernatural entity, it exists outside of the purview of scientific inquiry.

Monism, on the other hand, is the view held by most modern scientists. It posits that the mind and brain cannot be separated from one another; they are different descriptions, measurements, and interpretations of the same thing. To separate the mind from the brain is to separate heads from tails. They are two sides of the same coin.

Modern Scientific Perspectives
When a student takes an introductory psychology class, he or she is exposed to a number of psychological perspectives that have developed over the past century or so, such as behaviorism, humanism, and psychodynamic psychology. Increasingly, modern attempts at unifying the information gleaned from these disparate psychological perspectives are looking to advances in the neurosciences. In fact, the bio-psycho-social perspective dominates the pages of newer psychology texts. Why is this?

Because every day, research is produced showing correlations between mental states and brain activity. As Bellanova pointed out, Steven Pinker famously said that "the mind is what the brain does." Scientists no longer doubt that consciousness, or our own subjective awareness of self, is inextricably linked to brain activity. There is absolutely no evidence that the self persists once the brain has perished. In fact, even a living brain that has been ravaged by disease can offer clues as to how the mind originates from brain. Those of us who have seen the effects of dementia, severe brain injury, or debilitating memory impairment, such as that seen in Korsakoff's patients, can attest to the fact that when the brain deteriorates, the mind follows.

Perhaps one of the most telling examples comes from the account of Phineas Gage. In 1848, he suffered an unfortunate accident that caused a large iron railroad tool to impale his head. The path of the tool has been digitally rendered:

Incredibly, Gage survived the injury. Firsthand reports of his recovery indicate that after the accident, he became a qualitatively different person. The damage to his left frontal lobe actually altered his personality. Dr. John Harlow, the town physician, wrote that "his contractors, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again." If the mind (i.e., self) exists as a truly separate entity, shouldn't it persist in its premorbid form following physical damage to the brain itself?

How Does This Relate To Mental Illness?
Knowing that the mind and brain are two sides of the same coin in no way implies a deterministic worldview, nor does monism remove free will from the conversation. The brain is highly plastic, and because of this, attentional control can alter neural pathways. However, this feedback mechanism should not be mistaken for a dualistic view. The mind does not exert power on the brain nor does the brain exert power on the mind. Mind is an emergent property of brain. Mental illness is a dysfunction of both sides of the coin, which is why some combination of medication and talk therapy is usually prescribed. And for those who think that this is purely a reductionistic, materialistic view of the self, let's not forget the central theme of gestalt psychology: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You are greater than the sum of your brain cells, although without them, you wouldn't be.

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Comments

[entervista]

04:03 PM on 03/28/2012

I thought every cell of the body had "mind".

[jack Winn]

11:17 AM on 12/30/2011

Having posters vote is incredibly more scientific than having shrinks vote. Which is of course precisely how they arrive at DSM diagnoses, so that for example one day homosexuality is an incurable mental disease, and the next day it's perfectly normal.

Now, for those of you who paid attention in high school math & science classes, you already know that is massive sarcasm. Science is about skepticism, and facts are not something that are established by vote.

[jack Winn]

10:44 AM on 12/30/2011

Only shrinks have free will. Everybody else is biologically predestined.

The only exception to that is when you want to hold a shrink responsible for something. Then they have mental illnesses.

You think I'm kidding? This has been documented.

[kaisassy]

03:35 PM on 12/22/2011

Thank you for doing this series. As someone who lives with bipolar disorder, I identify with much of the information you are sharing in your posts. I work for NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), which is a great organization providing education, support and advocacy programs and services for people affected by mental illness. Thank you for pointing out that mental illnesses are medical, biological brain disorders. Someone can't "snap out of" mental illness, we wouldn't expect someone to snap out of cancer or diabetes. Thank you for educating others about mental illness - hopefully breaking some of the pervasive stigma that exists today.

[chickeyd]

09:58 AM on 12/14/2011

If the "mind" is a combination of the brain thinking and hormones feeling, then why are there so many arguing against mental illness being a mind disorder, and/or a chemical imbalance?

[jack Winn]

10:45 AM on 12/30/2011

Because "mental illness" is by definition relative to a particular situation. If you can't identify a balance, how can you identify an imbalance?

It's a hypothesis that is interestingly internally contradictory. Pretty much like any religion.

[psychetrick]

11:09 PM on 12/09/2011

psychiatry, mental health, all this is very well imagining this and that,intellectualizing about chemicals , pictures, feelings, minds , thoughts, imaginings, monoism, dualist, brains, but where is the LOVE, where is the measure of a broken heart, what does that picture tell you, have you got a picture or a balance for that,we all know there are happy people, but there are very sad and oppressed people out here, and there all being weighed up by the care in the imagination of the oppressors forcing poisons down their throats and eventually being electrocuted into total despair, and they've got no where and no one to turn to, how do we weigh that.

[zenju2]

04:22 AM on 12/08/2011

Mind is a wonderful emergent property of matter. Meditation is an excellent way to engage and change the brain for calm, clarity and control. I'm eager to witness the findings of neuroscience changing psychology from a 'soft science' to a real one.

[jack Winn]

10:46 AM on 12/30/2011

What guru told you this?

[psychetrick]

12:15 AM on 12/08/2011

Do Feelings come from the thinking, or thinking come from the feelings,do we think bad and thats what makes us feel bad, or do we feel bad and thats what makes us think bad,is it one or the other, or one and the other, or is it not one or the other, but a mix, whether its the chicken before the egg, or the egg before the chicken, doesn't matter, what matters is, you cant just go in gung ho style incarcerate and poison people against their wishes because you think its a certain way, and then arrogantly and condescendingly tell the victim they have no insight, or anosognosia, everyone is entitled to see it how it fits with them in their bodies, minds and their hearts, psychiatry cant claim to be fixing a brain if its breaking a heart, or making them feel sick mentally and physically, a feeling(heart) and a mind go together like day and night,the sky and the stars, and that heart is connected to a family also, so its not just one heart breaking is it, its time the three professions got together, psychology, psychiatry, and nutritionists, because sometimes its also in whats happening in the body, and what your putting in the body.

[sakovkt]

11:52 PM on 12/07/2011

Isn't that what Michelle Bachman has been saying?

[dsws]

11:01 PM on 12/07/2011

Information-processing systems, saliently including natural human information-processing systems, are composed of ordinary matter; they change according to the same physics that describes how anything else changes. Mind is an abstraction, constituting the imputed subject of mental descriptions of those information-processing systems. It does not follow, however, that mental descriptions ought to be eliminated from our language, even in principle. Just as the language of taxonomy is ill-suited to discussing ecology, so the language of physical description is ill-suited to discussing the most interesting sorts of information-processing systems.

[XV8 Crisis Suit]

10:23 PM on 12/07/2011

When the author equivocated "mind" with "self," my head nearly exploded! It turned the whole, "Before we can engage in a meaningful conversation about the science of mental health, we must ensure that we're operating with similar definitions of its associated terms" into an excellent bit of irony.

Additionally, the author is clearly stacking the deck against dualism. This is a good time to point out that if a person's presentation of an opponent's position makes it sound so stupid you want to ask, "Why the hell would anyone believe that?", then it probably isn't actually an argument that their opponent would put forward. They, such as this author, have most likely misrepresented it. Hell, not even Descartes--who was a strict property dualist after all--argued that the immaterial mind could not seem to be affected in any way by the physical organism. To say that this is a problem for dualists is to not understand them.

If I were Descartes, I would not reckon that the brain was the opposite side of the coin of the mind, but instead, borrowing from today's technology, the brain is to the radio receiver as the mind is to the radiowaves. Damage the radio, and it can still make sound, although the sound it makes will be funky and not like what we heard before a hammer was taken to it. Did the radiowaves get damaged? No, but its appearance and interaction is now fundamentally altered, despite both existing independently.

[Media Anatomy]

08:12 AM on 12/08/2011

Brilliant answer. The so called "proofs" that scientists cite are no proofs at all. Open mind is what scientists should be all about, and yet they so desperately try to close subjects that humanity is so far from even beginning to be able to merge. So please scientists: just do your freaking jobs! Save your judgements to yourselves. People like Dawkins turn science into a cheap soap opera.

[XV8 Crisis Suit]

05:40 PM on 12/08/2011

I just noticed I called Descartes a "property dualist" when he is, in fact, a substance dualist. My fault. It was a lack of sleep. However, the point I was trying to make still stands.

[HelloImTroyMcclure]

11:48 AM on 12/09/2011

You cannot have the mental without the material. I would ask anyone endorsing substance / Cartesian dualism to please provide evidence of a mind without a brain.

Your radio analogy fails because - just like we have no evidence / experience of minds existing without brains - we have no evidence of radio waves originating / emanating from something non-physical. A radio does interact with radio waves - but both are purely physical / material - and radio waves can / will exist despite the non-existence of the radio... the same cannot be said of the "mind".

Science is open-minded; however, it can (and should) only be open to the testable. Supernaturalism is not testable - and thus cannot be considered scientific. If one makes a supernatural claim, then one must be prepared to NEVER have scientific evidence to back their assertions / hypotheses. If one did have evidence to support the supernatural, then that would simply be folded into the methodilogical naturalism that science uses, and would thus become part of our current understanding of the universe.

[dsws]

07:06 PM on 12/07/2011

Tell us about Turing machines.

[jericarla]

05:52 PM on 12/07/2011

The mind does not exert power on the brain nor does the brain exert power on the mind. Mind is an emergent property of brain. Mental illness is a dysfunction of both sides of the coin, which is why some combination of medication and talk therapy is usually prescribed. i tend to disagree with this statement . brain must exert power on the mind, go to college, study which will cause brain damage, and your mind and brain grow. mental illnes respondes to chemical treatment of the brain tissues when prescribed. this causes the symptoms exhibited by the mind( ie: behavior) to be modified . thus it would seem brain does have some power over the mind.

[Syllogizer]

02:35 PM on 12/07/2011

Cara has once more, in her own example, illustrated the proverb, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". This time, it is her little knowledge about epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

How can any truly educated, thinking person start a history of dualism (in the philosophy of mind sense) with Descartes? His was a late form of dualism, special enough to earn its own restrictive, qualifying epithet, 'Cartesian'. Dualism was 'popularized' long before him by Plato himself.

But that is not the worst of her errors disguised as unquestionable scientific truths. There is more. There is, for example, her confusing of correlation with causation. Yes, science has come up with more correlation between SIMPLE mental events and physiologically identifiable events in the brain, but even fMRI still gives only very crude indications of what is going on in the brain. But more importantly, correlation is not causation, so seeing this correlation does NOT prove that the "mind is what the brain does", no matter how catchy the phrase.

[dsws]

10:29 PM on 12/07/2011

Cartesian dualism is the most prominent form, at least in ordinary public consciousness. It's entirely appropriate that an article of this length for a lay audience should mention Descartes and not much more about dualism.

[Syllogizer]

05:08 PM on 12/08/2011

No, that does not make it "appropriate". On the contrary: her choice to mention only Cartesian Dualism without even mentioning what a small subset of Dualism that is served only her ulterior motive of skewing the article with a straw-man argument in favor of gross, materialistic reductionism.

[18]

01:50 PM on 12/07/2011

While the debate continues, a million people with serious mental illness are in prison instead of treatment; over 200,000 are homeless, and that is not counting people with addictions. Mental illness IS a medical illness and while the federal government inacted mental health insurance partity laws, it is continuing to discriminate against people with the most severe mental illness, who sometimes need in-patient rehabilitative treament. There is a law called the Medicaid Institutes for Mental Diseases (IMD) Exclusion which denies Medicaid coverage to Medicaid eligible adults while treated in a facility that primarily treats people with a mental illness or substance abuse. Because of the Medicaid IMD Exclusion, state hospitals have closed - and I already opened this comment with the result.

For those of you who will decry that people deserve to be treated in the community, I agree, but when it is appropriate. The Supreme Court decision that upheld a person's right to be treated in the community also declared that hospitals should not be closed and that there are times when treatment in an "institutional" setting is appropriate. That is the key word - appropriate.

The Medicaid IMD Exclusion is federally sanctioned discrimination and it is killing people.

www.paulslegacyproject.org