Wired Wrong

“Psychiatrists make diagnoses today the same way they did in 1840 when Abraham Lincoln was depressed, through talking to patients and looking for symptom clusters. Psychiatrists are the only medical specialists that never look at the organ they treat. Isn’t that a scam…to make diagnoses of brain dysfunction without ever looking at the brain?

No question we have a long way to go and a lot more research to do, but to continue as most psychiatrists currently practice is not only backwards it is downright hurtful to people.

Dr. Rubin’s assessment of my work misses the mark completely. I am not interested in what your brain looks like as part of a group of depressed patients. I am looking at what your own brain specifically looks like. I am looking at an N of 1, your brain. Illnesses like depression will never have a singular finding on scans because they are not a singular disease. There are many different types that need an individual approach, that is where scans help…what does your brain look like, so that I can target treatment specifically to your brain.
Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institutes for Mental Health said in 2005 at the American Psychiatric Association that “Brain imaging in clinical practice is the next major advance in psychiatry…Trial and error diagnosis will move to an era where we understand the underlying biology of mental disorders….We are going to have to use neuroimaging to begin to identify the systems pathology that is distributed in each of these disorders and think of imaging as a biomarker for mental illnesses…The DSM-IV has 100%reliability and 0% validity. We need to develop biomarkers, including brain imaging, to develop the validity of these disorders….We need to develop treatments that go after the core pathology, understood by imaging…The end game is to get to an era of individualized care.”

Dr. Insel believed in 2005 that brain imaging in clinical practice would be a reality in 5 years. I think that brain imaging in clinical practice is long overdue. You can try to kill yourself in virtually every major city in the world, and no one will look at your brain!…”

I couldn’t have said it better myself, and this is just my normal arrogance not my bipolar grandiosity. I appreciate every bit of symptom relief I am afforded however I really don’t want a guessed at diagnosis with a dire prognosis. I want to know exactly what is wrong with my brain and be able to employ the available tools to make the corrections that will allow me to have a life I cherish, one to put the HAPPY and THANKFUL in HAPPY THANKSGIVING!