Understanding Mental Health

David Anderson starts his mental health speech by debunking the current knowledge and treatment of the brain. A great analogy he uses is that taking contemporary drugs for a complex mental disorder is like changing engine oil by pouring a can of oil onto your engine block. He says that the brain is a lot more complex than that and the problems need to be carefully pinpointed.

He proves this theory in his mental health speech with a recent study he and his colleagues did on fruit flies. The team at Caltech addressed specific regions of the fly's brain in order to get various results about flies that had mutant dopamine receptors. He said depending on where the dopamine receptor was genetically fixed, each fly would either improve their hyperactivity or learning abilities, while showing no improvement in the other areas respectively. Having learned this, he says that humans need to have certain sections of their brains specifically addressed as well.