Although we thought we were masters of our memory and our impulses, we see that the bacteria in our gut significantly modulate how our brain works.
Mental health plans address humans, an indivisible composite of environment, body, brain and the microbes that live inside and outside our bodies.
If mental illness is produced by society, with so much interest, we would need its social engineers heavily armed with ideology. But the level of science in these three fields does not support such an ideologically driven vision. We are biology, individual and social psychology. The proposed law at some points ridicules the biological, because for them mental health is of a socio-economic nature and should be regulated by the state. Therefore, it is the state that should dictate the rules and customs to be mentally healthy.
This is a nonsense, along with others such as being able to set up barricades and set fire to demonstrations, and being able to videotape the servants of order. In short, like that of "for the Empire towards God" or the more recent "conquering the heavens", arrogance always expresses itself in a similar way: through dictatorships.
As far as this law is concerned, it does not take into account the knowledge of the scientific, medical and psychiatric community, ignoring all the guidelines of medical practice, international mechanisms and the fruit of consensus among the world's scientists. It is up to them, the politicians, to dictate who should be treated and how. It is a pity that there is not a single mention of the brain, neuroscience or research. Another nonsense, as they want to limit the driving licence for old people and at the same time want to make Spain the pensioners' paradise of Europe. I will touch on this another day.
No reference to substance use without considering the enormous weight it has on the development of all kinds of diseases, early mortality, resistance to treatment, chronicity and traffic accidents of this origin. They also want to restrict driving licences for the elderly and, at the same time, they want Spain to be the pensioners' paradise of Europe. I will touch on this subject another day.
The whole plan must study and contemplate what a human being is, knowing what things from the body are going to improve or worsen the mental, and what is understood from science, since the mental is a component of the body itself. So we have to include the body and design such a plan from medicine, biology, neuroscience, as well as from the humanities.
If we start with the mental, we must state that our brain is the result of the accumulation of functions, anatomies and solutions successfully tested in other species with skulls, in addition to the processes that originated from the multiple species of hominids.
The brain is only one part of the nervous system, which in turn is only one part of the body. This body, moreover, is framed in a social, genetic and epigenetic context. And all this has a decisive effect on the development and life history of the individual, but not as interpreted by messianic ideologies. It cannot be divided into parts. That is the challenge.
We are separated from almost all animals by the long family upbringing, where we arrive with only 30% of the brain functioning. Practically with the brain stem, which will influence through its chemical and neuromodulatory signals and messages the development of the rest of the components. All this depends on the first years to finish the assembly, connections, anatomy and operability of this, being this circumstance the main cause of many serious dysfunctions of the mind or its health. Because it will be a period of introjections and identifications with their caregivers. Moreover, during the second trimester of pregnancy, we are at a decisive moment in the development of the nervous system. Are mental health plans going to help pregnant women, couples, in any way?
We must understand the enormous precariousness in which we are born and the absolute dependence on parental love to complete the assembly of our brain anatomy. This is achieved through the unwavering emotional dedication of the parents. Then, for the rest of life, it will be small changes. The emotional structure of the child and adolescent that we were will never stop functioning and directing when we enter a crisis, since our mind assimilates, creates and identifies with models, patterns, perceptions fixed from those foundational periods, something that remains in force forever. On the other hand, we see how abused children live shorter lives, because this circumstance has shortened their telomeres. We can understand why people with dementia become children again: because the experiences create the foundations on which adulthood is built, which, being evolutionarily recent, are more easily lost. However, in advanced dementia, almost everything that was built beyond adolescence has been lost. They can express themselves as if they were in their childhood, name someone in the family as if they were their mother.
Understanding how our brain has been assembled is prior to any consideration of what is human if the 70% of what we are has been constructed during childhood, in addition to the genetic factors that will shape our character and imprint health and disease potentials. Therefore, there is no need for all the theories that want to prove that it is social life that drives our emotional world and that it is social life that robs us of our mental health. This theory was already put into practice in Italy fifty years ago and the sick were released into asylums: it was a disaster for them and did not prove anything of what was intended.
Society itself may destabilise our mental structures, but it does not create them. We depend on our genetic inheritance and the interpretation that can be given to it from what we understand as epigenetics -in particular DNA methylation. Research is continuing on the interactions between genes and environmentwhich can be decisive in health and mental development. But we should not be pontificated about the environment as the cause of our ills, breaking the trio of body, brain and environment. In dictatorships, everything that gets in the way, be it parliaments or religion, is destroyed. It is from the emotional world, which is almost all we are, that we lose our so-called mental health, because reason and conscience are a minority in the face of the overwhelming content of our limbic brain, brainstem, cerebellum and the rest of the body, the seat of the emotional world. Pure biology, anatomy and psychology: a unity that is incomprehensible separately.
A fragile world, easily altered in people who have not had sufficient assistance and emotional presence in the family or during an adolescence that has questioned, disrupted and eroded what the parents provided. Fragile because our brain is still plastic, ready for permanent change, producing new neurons to store knowledge and wisdom in order to adapt, but in need of protection. The rarefied environment that accompanies us today destabilises us and we do not feel protected in many respects.
So, what are we going to do to protect, inform and help parents from paediatrics, from individual, couple and family psychology? Strengthen our inseparable unity: body, mind and environment.
*The texts reflect the views of the author and are independent of the opinions of PROA.