Acute sleep deprivation can apparently make depression better, but the effect only lasts until you go to sleep. That's what this article is about. Chronic sleep deprivation is very different and can cause depression.
This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness.
> This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness.
If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms.
I say this because over time, more and more "mental" illnesses have been recategorized as physical or genetic conditions that happen to have mental symptoms, including schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome, both of which respond dramatically to neurological treatments, and not at all to psychological treatments.
This change in the status of "mental" illnesses was recently recognized by the director of the NIMH, who in Scientific American said, "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient's illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely "mental," and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."
If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms.
I bet there are few here that don't already believe that. Further, whether the article is correct or not, depression is a physical illness with mental symptoms.
And I'm very glad the medical world has moved past the idiocy of the early and mid-20th century beliefs around mental illness. Maybe now we can get to some effective treatments.
My money is on pharmacology being only a single piece of the treatment, with many required (diet, exercise) to achieve full health. But hopefully a pill will help people have enough hope and energy to fulfill the rest of the treatment.
But it's trivially true that any "mental" state can at least be modulated by brain chemistry. Unless you posit some kind of free-floating mind that operates magically, all mental states supervene on physical, biological processes, whether we're talking about depression or programming ability or personality or food preferences.
Not every computer problem is a hardware problem, even though the software is running on some hardware. Whether the "mind" is emergent or external, it is not particularly useful to ignore it.
Brain injuries and hormonal problems are hardware.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a database problem.
Illogic and a tendency to over-simplify or rely on metaphors are software bugs. grin
Of course, the software and database are built in self-modifying firmware, so physical and mental issues do interact in interesting ways.
> Not every computer problem is a hardware problem, even though the software is running on some hardware.
Well, there is a level on which it is, in that "software" is just hardware writ small. That is, all software that exists and actually runs on a computer exists in the form of physical configuration of states of matter, not as some non-physical entity. This was obvious in the case of some early computers where "programs" were macroscopic wiring configurations, but it is no less true of modern computers.
The artificial distinction between hardware and software can be a very useful tool in thinking about computer issues, but it isn't really true in the fundamental sense.
I agree with that as well. My point was the more limited one that showing "when I poke at the hardware the observed behavior changes" isn't particularly surprising, or on its own evidence of a uniquely "hardware" etiology for the behavior, since any behavior can be modulated by poking at the hardware, if you figure out exactly how to poke. In other words, it does successfully show that the behavior is "hardware-mediated", but then all behavior is hardware-mediated.
> Whether the "mind" is emergent or external, it is not particularly useful to ignore it.
Certainly. But psychology's track record in identifying and "treating" mental illnesses is such that many are now looking toward neuroscience for (what they hope will be) more effective methods.
So I agree that ignoring the "mind" is unwise, but on the other hand, I don't think it should be given the status of a physical organ or assume (as many psychologists do) that it can lead to empirical science.
This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness.