Preventing Mental Illness: The Last Frontier
Mental Illness Diagnosis and Treatment
Mission
Medical science has reached the point where mental illness prevention is not an unrealistic dream. Under the leadership of NYU School of Medicine's Professor Dr. Robert Cancro, The Mental Illness Prevention Center has been created as a response to this severe and under-recognized public health crisis. It is our mission to understand the causes of mental disorders so that they can be prevented before their onset. Future generations deserve no less than this. It is a strange contradiction that as economic conditions have improved over the last fifty years, many of the psychological problems we face as a nation have gotten worse. Violence is everywhere. Young people commit suicide. Assassinations. Columbine. Jonestown. Divorce. Drugs. Terrorism. Psychiatry has responded to this crisis by learning how to suppress many symptoms and behaviors. This is like taking a painkiller to suppress the pain, but not curing the cause of the pain. Clearly, symptom suppression is worthwhile, but we have to move towards the eradication of major mental problems before they can damage future generations. The fundamental mission of MIPC is to prevent the onset of mental disorders by identifying the predisposing abnormalities that put a person at risk. Initially, we can screen populations using standard scales to identify people who are at increased risk for illnesses such as depression or obsessive compulsive disorder. MIPC recognizes the limitation of this methodology. What makes a disease is the underlying abnormal physiology of the individual and not the way it manifests itself. The person who has tuberculosis of the lung does not look like a person who has tuberculosis of the spleen, but they in fact have the same disease and should be treated in the same manner. The ability of our field to image the living brain makes it possible to identify abnormalities that predispose individuals to future illness. As we understand these abnormalities, we should ultimately be able to correct them so as to prevent the onset of the disorder. The underlying concept of MIPC is that mental disorders are a result of the failure of adaptation. Every adaptation can be understood as the successful balancing of the resources available to the individual to the demands placed upon that individual. The myriad demands that life places on us are stresses. Stress, however, should not be understood as a negative force. Stress is an integral part of life. Dealing with stress successfully is necessary for adaptation and growth. When the stressors exceed the individual’s adaptive capacity, the physiologic result is a temporary imbalance in the body’s adaptive mechanisms. This imbalance can become permanent and predispose an individual to increased vulnerability to future stressful events. The severity and the frequency of the stressors are critical determinants in producing the permanent imbalance. Stress that produces such a permanent imbalance can be conceptualized as trauma. These adaptive failures are most likely to occur early in development and are predisposing to less effective responses in later life. While the form the illness takes may be predetermined genetically, the fact of the breakdown into illness is the result of failure of stress management. We invite you to learn more about us and our focus on Detection, Prevention, and Rehabilitation. |