A current wellness-related topic we're often hearing about is mental
disorders. Often, mental disorders (or mental illnesses) are conditions
that affect your thinking, feeling, mood, and behavior. They may be
occasional or long-lasting (chronic). They can affect your ability to
relate to others and function each day. Common mental disorders
include anxiety, depression, bipolar, eating disorders, PTSD, and
more. Mental disorders are common, and it's reported that more than
half of all Americans will be diagnosed with a mental disorder at
some time in their life. Diagnosing mental-health issues may seem
easy enough. Patients discuss their symptoms and a doctor matches
those symptoms to a disorder and determines an appropriate
treatment. It usually involves some type of therapy. You may also
take medications, and some people also need support and education
on managing their conditions. We see these challenges continue and
on a rise with individuals, especially young people, coming out of a
troubling couple of years from the pandemic. In addition, you cannot
ignore the awful things happening in our communities, including
violence.
The value of the natural and applied science lens is valuable to
understanding this topic because research can show us things we still
have yet to discover. For something like mental disorders, I think
we're just scratching the surface. There is more work to be done. A
team of clinical scientists has looked into these complexities in a
report, taking a closer look at three systems used for understanding
mental-health disorders: the International Classification of Diseases
(ICD), the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM), and the Research Domain Criteria Project (RDoC).
The report shares: "Similarities and differences in the ways that the ICD,
DSM, and RDoC classify and conceptualize mental disorder, focusing on
overarching issues that such systems must confront. Given that mental
disorder results from a complex interplay between genetic, individual,
and sociocultural factors, understanding causal pathways necessarily
requires taking a nuanced, individualized approach. Furthermore,
determining the discrete categories and symptom thresholds that define
disorders is a difficult process -- it allows clinical practitioners to
diagnose and treat disorder, but it also constrains how we think about
individual functioning and outcomes."
Overall, the role of science in revising current diagnosis helps experts
to work toward those underlying issues.
References:
MedlinePlus. (n.d.). Mental Disorders. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from
https://medlineplus.gov/mentaldisorders.html
