Consequences of a biological model: a manifesto for biological psychiatry

For many scientists– I guess for all of us, it’s important to use the most up to date findings of science to help people who’ve got mental health problems. For Eric Kandel, it’s very important that we use the insights that we gain from biomedical science to help people who are in acute distress. If you’ve got a reward system in the brain based on predominantly the modification of the serotonin or dopamine molecules and some of the molecules interact and integrate with them and if you drive that system over a period of time by constantly giving it a molecular slap, right, then you’ll dampen not only the amount of these molecules you’ll make but the physical machinery to cope with it.

Another good example and something else that I advise you to read is a recent editorial by Nick Craddock and colleagues in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Nick, like Eric Kandel, argues that in order to help people with serious mental health problems, we really do need to understand the biological and neurological accounts of mental health issues.

I think that it’s important that we do understand these issues, and I have a great deal of respect for this perspective. But for me as a clinical psychologist, I come back to the idea that many of the findings from neurological science seem to apply to us all and perhaps have less relevance to explain why there are differences between people in terms of their experience of mental health. Another approach to understand people’s mental health problems will be to look at the events that people have experienced in their lives and whether differences between people, not so much in terms of neurological functioning, but in terms of the experiences that they’ve had could explain why there are differences in terms of mental health.

And we’ll cover that next week.