"When you get down to it, treatment for most mental illnesses remains a matter of trial-and-error.” Well, a sentence like that is bound to catch my attention – mostly because I totally agree with it. The researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) are working with the National Institutes of Health on a project to identify biological processes that may be linked to specific psychiatric diseases, as a way to better categorize these disorders.

You’ve heard me rant about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual before (DSM). It is just a book of symptoms really. And many disorders have overlapping symptoms.

UCLA’s project is exploring two weaknesses in cognitive schools – working memory and impulse control. By being able to quantify these two processes better, doctors are hoping to better be able to identify people who have or are developing psychiatric diseases. They are studying things at a cellular, genetic level. If they can pinpoint biologically what is going on with these diseases, that gives new hope for both medications and therapies that can help.

And, as more and more research is done in the biological/psychological connection, the more mental illness becomes a true ILLNESS and not a character flaw. To me, in addition to the fabulous treatments that may come from such an effort, the big benefit is the ever-so-slowly changing perception of mental illness.

I was frustrated when another mom reported to me how someone at her son’s school had a total change in voice when she found out that her hospitalized son was hospitalized at a psychiatric hospital. The stigma attached to even being evaluated for these disorders is tremendous.

But these researchers have started the new Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics. Through this consortium, over the next five years (or more) they will attempt to describe and map all the various combinations of phenome that can be produced from gene variations and how this relates to the neuropsychiatric disorders as we know them.

Researchers to Track Mental Illness from the Gene on Up

Mapping Mental Illness

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