Medical part of the Brain

For this week, I decided to look more into the medical part of this field of how the brain functions and works and exactly which part of the human brain does emotion and memories come from, and where mental illness attacks. I began with an article that helped me understand where it all begins "When the researchers compared the findings from different psychiatric disorders, they found that all of them showed loss of gray matter— the tissue that contains the bodies of nerve cells — in three regions deep in the brain: the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), the right insula and the left insula" (Gholipour pg. 5). This, to me, was very interesting, and I wanted to know and understand more about the three regions of the brain and what precisely this gray matter was. As I continued reading, this study came up, which caught my eye and made me wonder about the actual numbers of healthy brains to mentally damaged brains. The study went on to say" "We wanted to test a straightforward question that simply had not been asked" — whether common psychiatric disorders have a standard structure in the brain, Etkin told Live Science. To find out, Etkin and his colleagues turned to the medical literature. They sifted through nearly Bauer 2 200 structural brain imaging studies that involved more than 7,000 people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or anxiety, as well as some 8,500 healthy individuals" (Gholipour pg.10). Healthy individuals win by 1,500 more, which when you break that down in just this one study, that is not a very high number. If anything, it is somewhat scary that the number of people with health and poor mental health is so close together. As I went on, I found the world wide number which was precisely what I predicted: "In 2015, an estimated 16.1 million U.S. adults (aged 18 or older), or 6.7 percent of the adult population, had at least one major depressive episode, or experienced depressive symptoms, in the past year, making this condition one of the most common mental disorders in the United States, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH" (Gholipour pg.25). Furthermore, that was back in 2015. If we did the calculations due to covid and other trauma, those numbers have had to go up but a great ton. When reading this article, I always try to put myself in people's shoes and try to see and understand where I would go from finding out I have a mental disorder. Many people disagree with medications and have that fix mental health, and in a way, I agree a person can not act as if it will help everything in a way it is like a bandaid. With both communication and medication, I believe that that is the best way to help with mental illnesses a little bit from both angles. Therefore in the next ISM assessments, I will be researching and studying the different parts of the brain as well as what people think about counseling and or medication when trying to treat their mental health.