The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Can Primary Care Doctors Treat Depression? (ABC News Healthology, 12/9/2004) (link retired)
Years ago, if someone thought about mental health care, he or she might have imagined a pipe-smoking psychiatrist listening to a reclining depressed patient from his leather armchair. Today, depression is more likely to be treated by a primary care doctor who might not have time to sit down at all.
Identifying and treating depression is challenging in a busy primary care office, where waiting rooms might be filled to capacity every day. And there are concerns that depressed patients treated by primary care doctors, unlike those seen by mental health professionals, do not receive needed psychotherapy and close monitoring of their use of antidepressant medications. But some experts say that the primary care setting has the potential to help people find long-term relief from depression.
Let me make my response to this article short and sweet: this is just an attempt to make it easier to sell more drugs and letting depression treatment become the provenance of the general practitioner is not so much a change in attitude or treatment but a change in the level of honesty about what is going on out there concerning psycho-pharmaceuticals. They are not really listening to the patients in the psychiatrists offices much these days either. They do a very short interview and then make a prescription. The increased oversight of the psychiatrist over the general practitioner has more to do with follow-up visits when the drug is not working as expected and then a change in diagnosis goes with the change in prescription (at this point the GP should be sending the patient to a doctor with more expertise, but they might not). The movement is to make all treatments drug treatments because it saves money for the insurance companies and the movement to have the general practitioner do this diagnosis and prescribe the drugs is just a movement to save more money for insurance and make more money for the pharmaceutical companies. It is not a very big change in practice though.
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
