Deciphering Mental Illness

Description

Arif Khan, Rashmi Prakash, Anshu Arora, and Aishwarya Prasad argue that psychiatry's neuron-only picture of mental illness is too narrow. More than sixty approved drugs exist, yet their benefit over placebo stays modest and side effects are heavy. Surprising mood and reward effects from GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, large molecules once feared to mimic starvation's mental harm, pushed the authors to question synaptic models built on small transmitter molecules.

Psychiatric disorders run in families without following simple inheritance patterns, and symptoms vary widely, which weakens explanations based on DNA sequence alone. Drawing on Alan Turing's chemical-gradient ideas about development, the authors highlight astrocytes, support cells long treated as background. They review astrocyte variety across species and brain regions and propose that neurons and glia work as joined networks whose shared molecules produce mental function. Drug development, they suggest, should target those combined networks and the molecules glia release.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/PMC13506203