Another job for Dr. Venn

When I did physics at school, duality of matter was all the thing. The fact that when one got down to basics, matter could either be considered to be waves or it could be considered to be particles. So we had both waves of light and particles of light, aka photons.

Prompted by reference 1, it strikes me that something of the sort is appropriate in psychology.

Let us suppose that we have a list of all the possible psychological disorders, perhaps derived from the controversial DSM-5, the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association (references 3 and 4).

We then postulate three overlapping categories of disorder:

• Disorders which result from some structural or anatomical problem. Perhaps a stroke has damaged some small but important part of the brain
• Disorders which result from some disturbance to the brain’s chemical regime. Perhaps there is some problem with the supply of adrenalin (see references 5 and 6)
• Disorders which can be described in psychiatric or even psycho-analytic terms. Perhaps there is an unresolved Oedipus Complex.

The circular regions A, B and C respectively in the diagram above, where we use ‘A’ (said A bar, short for A excluding or barring both B and C) to refer to the part of that region which does not meet either of the other regions.

I suspect that A is a relatively large region, with many structural or anatomical problems not being amendable to pharmacology or psychiatry. They need the scalpel to cut things out, although there is a harbinger of a more positive sort of repair work at reference 2.

While I also suspect that there is quite a lot of overlap between B and C. That there are plenty of disorders which are amenable to either pharmacology or psychiatry. In any case, I believe that it is often the case that one needs pharmacology to calm down acute symptoms, to make space for the psychiatrist to work.

So there will be some disorders which can be described in either pharmacological terms, or it psychiatric terms, with both descriptions being equally valid, and with there being a two way stretch between the two. With successful pharmacological treatment correcting the psychiatric symptoms (matter over mind) and with successful psychiatric treatment correcting the pharmacological symptoms (mind over matter). A duality between the two avenues of attack.

While I believe in this duality already, it would be interesting to explore the precise mechanisms by which psychiatric intervention has a pharmacological result. No great problem in principle, seen from a good distance away: the psychiatric intervention rearranges a whole lot of neurons and synapses, some of which also happen to be involved in management of the brain's chemical regime, management which might well include just the sort of thing one might otherwise achieve pharmacologically. But a close up would be good. Perhaps it is time to take another look at the book noticed at reference 7.

References

Reference 1: Amygdala circuitry mediating reversible and bidirectional control of anxiety - Kay M. Tye and others – 2011.

Reference 2: Developing a hippocampal neural prosthetic to facilitate human memory encoding and recall - Robert E Hampson et al – 2018. Presently paywalled.

Reference 3: https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/dsm-5.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/ancient-wisdom.html.

Reference 6: Motor, cognitive, and affective areas of the cerebral cortex influence the adrenal medulla - Richard P. Dum, David J. Levinthal, and Peter L. Strick – 2016.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/a-day-in-life-of-brain.html.