Why Neuroscience Hasn't Delivered for Psychiatry

Recently a scholar lamented how little progress neuroscience is making.  She stated the following:

"Given the massive investment of public and private funds, to say nothing of human ingenuity, time and effort over the past 70 years, we should by now know so much more about what cognition is, what it’s for, and how it works – theories of these things, not simply data derived from brain activity. Think of how society has transformed since the 1950s....How much has been learned in so many fields?....Yet we still don’t have a good grip on the fundamentals of cognition: how the senses work together to construct a world; how and where memories are stored long term, whether and how they remain stable, and how retrieval changes them; how decisions are made, and bodily action marshalled; and how valence is assessed."

The reason for so little progress is that our scientists keep spending millions and billions on fool's errands,  trying to prove claims about brains producing minds and brains storing memories that have already been ruled out by low-level things that neuroscientists have discovered but ignored,  facts such as the extremely high molecular and dendritic spine turnover in the brain, the short lifetimes of brain proteins, the extremely high levels of many types of noise in the brain, the unreliable transmission of synaptic signals in the brain, and the very many slowing factors in the brain that should make brains too slow for things such as very fast thinking and instant memory recall. 

Another piece lamenting the lack of neuroscience progress is the paper "Why hasn't neuroscience delivered for psychiatry?" by David Kingdon, a professor of psychiatry. After noting some progress in medicine, Kingdon states the following:

"The major mental illnesses psychosis, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, anorexia nervosa and depression have proved remarkably resistant to similar developments. Unfortunately, it is still not possible to cite a single neuroscience or genetic finding that has been of use to the practicing psychiatrist in managing these illnesses despite attempts to suggest the contrary."

After noting the lavish funding that neuroscientists have long received in attempts to find a brain cause for mental illnesses, Kingdon states this: 

"Why do we not have evidence of biological malfunctioning for severe mental disorders? Mental disorder can becaused by biological insults such as frontal lobe damage,dementia and delirium, but biological changes have yet to be shown to be relevant to the major mental disorders." 

Talking about changes in the brain, Kingdon states this: "No such clear causative changes exist in severe mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia." After noting "25 years of research frustation," Kingdon quotes a neuroscientist who advocates that we keep at this not-getting-much-of-anywhere research approach. Kingdon then states this:

"But does this not seem, after more than 30 years of failure, more akin to a religious or, albeit culturally influenced, persistent strong belief than one based on scientific grounds? Just where is the rational justification for ploughing the same furrow again and again?"

Kingdon then ends by stating this: "The time has come to challenge the justification for such relatively high levels of investment of time, expertise and resource in neuroscience for mental disorders."

I can give an answer to the question posed by Kingdon's paper, the question of, "Why hasn't neuroscience delivered for psychiatry?" The answer is that the main claims of neuroscientists about brains and minds are incorrect. Our minds are not produced by our brains as neuroscientists claim. So looking for neural causes of the main mental illnesses is an approach likely to fail.  Once experts realize that mind is a fundamentally spiritual and psychic thing, they may start pursuing spiritual, social, psychological and psychic approaches to mental health treatment, approaches that may do far more for helping mental illness than neuroscientists have ever done. 

By far the most common mental disorders are depressive and anxiety disorders. A web page tells us that 19 million Americans suffer from depressive disorders, 48 million suffer from anxiety disorders, 7 million suffer from bipolar disorders, and 1.5 million suffer from schizophrenia.  The materialists who occupy neuroscience professor chairs are often people teaching things that may increase depression and anxiety. Such people often teach extremely gloomy views of life in which humans are regarded as mere accidents in a purposeless universe, beings destined to be silenced forever when they die. We may wonder whether people who believe in such teachings are far more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety.  

But what if instead of suppressing evidence for a human soul, our professors were to educate us in such evidence? What if instead of suppressing from their textbooks and lectures and essays 1001 accounts by reliable witnesses suggesting that a human being is a soul and a spirit with abilities that cannot be explained by bodies, our professors were to tell us about such cases?  What if instead of suppressing from their textbooks and lectures and essays dozens of neuroscience reasons for thinking that brains cannot be the source of our minds and the storage place of our memories, professors were instead to tell us about such reasons?  What if professors were to speak honestly about the brain, telling us that there is no sign of any memories stored anywhere in it, and no understanding of how a brain could produce something like instant recall or a remembrance of things that happened fifty years ago?  Then rather than thinking of themselves as some short-lived accident doomed to perish forever, people would tend to think of themselves as souls likely to survive death.  It would be likely that anxiety and depression would be mitigated by such realism and honesty. 

Postscript: One paper describes CT scans done on 500+ patients referred to a psychiatric institute:

"No abnormality was noted in 69% of CT scans. Cerebral atrophy, infarcts, cysts and calcific foci were present in 30% of patients. One patient presenting with focal neurology had a CT demonstrating an extradural haematoma which required neurosurgical intervention. No focal brain lesions, potentially responsible for the psychosis, were identified in any other patient. Conclusion: Routine CT screening of patients who present with psychotic symptoms, in the absence of focal neurological deficit, does not add value to patient outcome, but rather contributes to the escalating health care expenses and unnecessary radiation dose.". 

For an interesting article on the topics discussed here, read "The Rise and Fall of Biological Psychiatry" here.