The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) recently concluded a 40-year study on brain science and mental health. While researchers admit they are still far from a definitive explanation on brain mechanisms influencing mental health, the researchers behind the landmark study are confident that mental health has something to do with the brain.
During the study’s time period, biomedical psychiatry has come under increased criticism from stakeholders who claim that brain and genetic research has not yielded the results to merit the funding dominance that biomedical sciences enjoy in mental health.
“They say the brain is as deep and mysterious as the ocean, and it is,” says Clancy Bouvier, the fiery administrator of an Anti-Psychiatry Facebook group dedicated to telling others not to take psych meds. “But it feels like they are scuba diving to change rising water temperatures while neglecting the ozone in the process.”
NIMH researcher Bernice Hibbert rejects this framing. “These people have been singing the same song for ages. And what has it done to decrease rates of mental illness? Nothing.”
But Bouvier says that same argument applies more compellingly to NIMH’s research focusses. “It’s undeniable to me that the brain-gene-environment interactions create mental illness, but if our understanding of social pathways is not investigated as thoroughly as biomedical ones, then the latter is nothing but a bunch of flashy, billion-dollar brain scans that add no real value to the lives of people with psychiatric conditions.”
Hibbert had prepared a binder of brain scans in support of the study, but quietly placed it away in a bag and declined further comment. Study researchers were further humbled by recent successes of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who found the cause of autism in less than one year of research.