New Mental Health Model is Good News

There is a new intellectual framework recently arrived within the psychiatric profession that will dramatically affect the way we will think about mental health in the decades ahead. It’s called “interpersonal neurobiology.”

In this new mental health science our mind is seen as being derived from the interaction of the brain and interpersonal processes, especially in our early development. Because this new science is more broadly based on both biological and social science research, it becomes a much more integrated medical discipline. The present molecular or psycho-pharmacological emphasis alone is no longer sufficient.

Perhaps the most significant and salient finding from recent neural science research is best expressed by the principal architect, Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, in Mindsight – The New Science of Personal Transformation. Siegel states:

“Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain’s structure and function.
There is no need to choose between brain or mind, biology or experience, nature or nurture. These divisions are unhelpful and inhibit clear thinking about an important and complex subject: the developing brain.”

While our genes remain an important component of our mental functioning, developmental factors are also significant and continue throughout the life span. For example, recent neural research, including the latest brain scanning technology, shows that learning produces physical alterations both in gene expression, brain structure and functioning. Thus human interaction both shapes and is shaped by an ever-changing and dynamic brain throughout life.

The corollary is that heredity alone does not necessarily need to be perceived as a permanent condition and that human experience throughout the life span has the potential to modify, neutralize and repair both constitutional and psychosocial determinants. Such life-long brain plasticity findings can bring hope to millions who are seeking healing and daily transformation.

These latest neural findings have long-term mental health policy and funding implications for persons suffering with serious chronic mental diseases. With modern brain scanning technology and ever-increasing neural evidence that supports an ever-changing brain ---whether psychopharmacological and/or psychosocial therapeutically induced --- it now becomes morally necessary to consider scheduling major periodic psychiatric and/or neurological exams for persons suffering from “chronic” mental illness.

Persons suffering from “chronic” mental disorders should not be stuck with old dead-end and long-term diagnoses but regularly and comprehensively reviewed in the light of these latest neural science findings.

That not all schizophrenic patients need to be on antipsychotics all their lives was recently rigorously demonstrated in Dr. Martin Harrow’s fifteen year old long-term, evidenced based, outcome study conducted at the Illinois College of Medicine.

Based on 68 young patients, and using global assessment scales at three year intervals, forty percent of those off medications recovered over the long run compared to only five percent of those still taking antipsychotics.

These research findings, presented at the 2008 American Psychiatric Association meeting, are presented in both readable and graphic form in Robert Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” along with fourteen other long-term, evidenced based, outcome study findings which further support Harrow’s findings.

This will be welcome news to younger patients and their parents, and will bring hope especially to our youngest love ones.

Mental health policy makers and practitioners who are in search of a more open, holistic and balanced mental health model will also find both Siegel and Harrow’s work a valuable addition to their therapeutic literature.

Readers can learn more at Mindgains.org and MindsightInstitute.com
and at Robert Whitaker’s Psychology Today’s blog.

Benedict is a family mental health reform advocate