#neuoscience

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We have an oversimplified and increasingly outmoded view of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders. We tend to view them [...] as chemical imbalances in the brain [...] this view is conditioned by the fact that many of the drugs that are prescribed to treat these disorders [...] act by globally changing brain chemistry, as if the brain were indeed a bag of chemical soup. But that can’t be the answer, because these drugs actually don’t work all that well. A lot of people won’t take them, or stop taking them, because of their unpleasant side effects. These drugs have so many side effects because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block.  An emerging view is that psychiatric disorders are actually disturbances of neural circuits that mediate emotion, mood, and affect. When we think about cognition, we analogize the brain to a computer. Well, it turns out that the computer analogy is just as valid for emotion, it’s just that we don’t tend to think about it that way. But we know much less about the circuit basis of psychiatric disorders because of the overwhelming dominance of this “chemical imbalance” hypothesis. Now, it’s not that chemicals are not important in psychiatric disorders, it’s just that they don’t bathe the brain like soup. Rather, they’re released in very specific locations, and they act on specific synapsis, to change the flow of information in the brain.

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