BECAUSE THE WORKINGS of the brain are less well understood than those of any other organ, it is quite common in psychiatry for useful drugs to be stumbled upon. Chlorpromazine, the first drug used to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia, was originally marketed as an anaesthetic before being tried on psychiatric patients. Iproniazid, the first antidepressant, was originally used to treat tuberculosis. For those who view the DSM’s 300-plus mental disorders as brain problems with a biological basis, this is a source of frustration.
As director of America’s National Institute of Mental Health, the world’s biggest funder of mental-health research, Thomas Insel is responsible for deciding how it spends its dollars. He likes to say that we do not even have a parts list for the brain, so he has set about acquiring one. In 2013 the federal government launched the BRAIN initiative, which aims to identify and categorise the different types of neurons in the brain and map the connections between them. This is a giant undertaking. Brain cells come in a bewildering number of shapes, and their number is daunting: a human brain has about 86 billion neurons,...
from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1KXAQtv
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