• Question: how can madness be solved?

    Asked by sebisepic to Jen, Jill, Mel, Phil, Stef on 18 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Phil Rice

      Phil Rice answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      Hi and good question. Madness has many causes – infectious, genetic, drug-induced etc, but the vast majority of causes are unknown – like schizophrenia for example. When I did a neuroscience degree I used to daydream about finding THE cause of this condition, but progress has been very slow even with the Human Genome Project and modern genetic mapping and sequencing techniques.

    • Photo: Jennifer Paxton

      Jennifer Paxton answered on 20 Mar 2013:

      As Phil said, there are lots of things that can cause “madness” but many of the causes are unknown. The human mind is soooo complicated and nobody really know how it works and what causes diseases of the mind.

      So what causes the brain to have different thoughts, emotions, responses to things?…….we just dont know really! A lot of things are causes by hormones, that are special chemicals that travel in our blood and tell our body/brain to do certain things. Many mental health problems can be helped using drugs to counter the effect of the hormone (or add in a hormone that we are missing) but not everything about the mind if known. If we did know more, then I’m sure there would be a lot more treatments for mental health problems available.

      The brain is really fascinating – I mean, it is really just a big blob of jelly but it can do so much – good and bad! I heard an interesting fact once…..if you hook a jelly up to a machine that measures brainwaves then sometimes you can get a signal. Apparently that signal is above the level that somebody has to have to be declared still “alive” if they are on a life support machine!

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