The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is celebrating 75 years. The NIMH will have an interim leader by June, while searching for a new director after the current one leaves. The NIMH is supposed to be the number one agency for mental health in the United States—and by consequence, the world.
The agency appears focused on serious mental illnesses. However, those and mental health problems of different forms remain deeply difficult. The problem is not a lack of data about the brain. The brain, though complex, has been explored in intricate anatomic and physiological details.
The problem could be where in the brain to look at. If health is the objective for mental, what is mental? Is mental the same as mind or does mind exceed mental? Is mental the same as all of the brain, or are there specific parts that are directly responsible for everything mental?
In Caring for Your Mental Health, the NIMH wrote, “Mental health includes emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It is more than the absence of a mental illness—it’s essential to your overall health and quality of life. Self-care can play a role in maintaining your mental health and help support your treatment and recovery if you have a mental illness.”
What is emotional? What is psychological? What functions for these in the brain?
The NIMH can use the opportunity of new leadership to pivot some parts of its research to seeking out the mind, its elements and how they relay. Then the NIMH can use that baseline to model disorders, helping the affected and loved ones to get a better picture of what might be happening—even conceptually, ahead of the labels of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision [DSM-5-TR].
Neuroscience is still mostly dominated by neurons. However, no theory has emerged for how to model neurons for behavior, emotions and so forth, due to how information organization criticality is, say, a step below cells. Neurons are established to be in clusters in the brain and other parts of the nervous system. Neurons are also known to communicate—through electrical and chemical signals.
These signals could be the leap that the NIMH may take, towards rendering the mind, for conditions. Below the signals, there is little else solid enough to model, such that even gene activation in the nucleus of neurons, often has to influence the signals, to have an effect. Simply, several gene effects, of neurons, take place by signals. So, what is also important is the architecture of signals, regardless of source, genes, environment and so forth.
It can be theorized that the collection of the electrical and chemical signals of neurons, with their interactions and features, in sets, across the central and the peripheral nervous system, is the mind—or mental. This is where all memory, emotions, feelings and modulations are based. Whatever must affect the mind must affect the sets of signals, with their features and, or interactions.
Their interactions can be said to be how they produce basic functions, like emotions and feelings, while their features can be said to be what qualifies those functions, like attention, intent, self and others.
Information is organized by the interactions. Information includes emotions, many aspects of behavior and so forth. Problems from childhood that shape people are information organized and presented in certain ways, like how memory is encoded and retrieved. Problems with teen mental health resulting from social media and smartphone use can be modeled by electrical and chemical signals to prospect extents.
Depression, for example, as a state can be said to be a result of defective interactions and a qualifier called the principal spot, where domination of other sets and heaviness stems from. Anxiety, hallucinations, delusions, thought disorder, intrusive thoughts, traumatic brain injury, disconnection from reality, substance use disorder, other addictions and so forth, can be described by the interactions of signals and their features in sets. Sets are assumed to be structured by the clusters of neurons.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the NIMH and others may eventually arrive at the answer without the mind. It is also possible to make space to explore the [components or signals of] mind theoretically, towards describing parallel architectures for mental conditions that may assist in shaping care.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
