When the Body Attacks the Mind: A physiological theory of mental illness

[Kyla]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/when-the-body-attacks-the-mind/485564/

excerpt:

When the Body Attacks the Mind
A physiological theory of mental illness

• MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF
  
• JULY/AUGUST 2016 ISSUE
  

One day in february 2009, a 13-year-old boy named Sasha Egger started thinking that people were coming to hurt his family. His mother, Helen, watched with mounting panic that evening as her previously healthy son forgot the rules to Uno, his favorite card game, while playing it. She began making frantic phone calls the next morning. By then, Sasha was shuffling aimlessly around the yard, shredding paper and stuffing it in his pockets. “He looked like an old person with dementia,” Helen later told me.

That afternoon, Sasha was admitted to the hospital, where he saw a series of specialists. One thought Sasha might have bipolar disorder and put him on antipsychotics, but the drugs didn’t help. Helen, a child psychiatrist at Duke University, knew that psychiatric conditions develop gradually. Sasha’s symptoms had appeared almost overnight, and some of them—including dilated pupils and slurred speech—suggested not mental illness but neurological dysfunction. When she and her husband, Daniel, raised these issues, though, one doctor seemed to think they were in denial.


Sasha, meanwhile, grew increasingly agitated and refused to eat. Food tasted like sewage, he said. Just five days after his strange behavior began, he was in the intensive-care unit, heavily sedated and being fed through a tube. No one knew for sure what was wrong with him...

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Oh FFS a lot of those doctors need struck off or incredibly serious reprimands
Sick of this kind of stupidity from them :/

if you've ever seen someone suffer from psychotic behaviour due to low blood sugar, bladder infection etc, as they MUST surely have done or been taught about, it should be blindingly obvious that this was neurological
and we know autoimmune syndromes that target the brain (Multiple Sclerosis for example)
and there must be infections or toxins we cannot detect (basic fact of science and also from how much isn't understood or we could cure it)
but there none so blind as those who WILL NOT see
:/

 

[Woolie]

Without wanting to criticise the author (its an interesting article), can I point out that the title "When the body attacks the mind" is actually a dumb thing to say?

Most people now take the view that the mind is a product of the body's functioning in the first place (the brain particularly, but probably other body systems as well). Its likely that, due to its sheer complexity, mental function is especially vulnerable to dysfunction involving those bodily systems.

So of course, any dysfunction in the body could affect the "mind". They're not separate, they're one and the same.