Brain imaging uncovers origins of mental health issues

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K. Luan Phan, MD: Mental illness is a stigmatizing phenomenon within our society. People feel a lot of shame and a lot of guilt because they're struggling with stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, and so it's important to bring those conditions to the forefront and then try to help explain to our patients and their families that it's not their fault. This is an illness rooted in an organ, just like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer is rooted in another organ of the body. Mental illness is rooted in the brain.

We often think about stress and adversity as environmental events or historical events, things that happen to us. The interesting thing is that those things actually embed themselves into our own biology, into our DNA, in our blood and in our brains. It changes the way that our brain works. And the big question for us in the field is how does someone respond to that stress and adversity? Do they have the right mechanisms biologically to respond to stress and adversity? And finding that difference between who does well and who doesn't do well is going to be fundamental going forward for our field.

So much of our field is rooted in self-report. I assess you and how well you're doing in terms of a mental health space based on how you tell me how things are going. The promise of brain imaging is that we'll be able to add to that vocabulary so we can explain in more than just psychological or social terms why you're struggling, and we give an image to the story, a biological objective, medical image to that story and that history.

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