The Inflamed Mind

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Depression or psychotic illness is experienced by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the UK. James Gallagher talks to the psychiatrists investigating this new understanding of mental illness and to people who may benefit from treatments aimed at the immune systems rather than their brain cells.

“I believe this is one of the strongest discoveries in psychiatry in the last twenty years”, says Professor Carmine Pariante of his and other research on the immune system and depression. "It allows us to understand depression no longer as just a disorder of the mind and not even a disorder of the brain, but a disorder of the whole body. It shifts conceptually what we understand about depression."

James also talks to New York journalist Susannah Cahalan. She began to experience paranoid delusions and florid hallucinations when her immune system made damaging antibodies against part of the molecular circuitry in her brain. Treatment to eliminate the antibodies prevented her committal to psychiatric hospital. Psychiatrist professor Belinda Lennox at the University of Oxford says she has evidence that a significant proportion of people presenting for the first time with psychotic symptoms are victims of a similar autoimmune problem.

(Photo: Brain Cells © Science Photo Library)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:03.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use,
0:07.0	go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. broadcasts.
0:21.0	I believe this is one of the strongest discovery in psychiatry of the last 20 years. It's pretty radical.
0:25.0	We are exploring the idea that we can develop new treatment options for
0:30.0	psychiatric disorders that work through the immune system rather than through the nervous system.
0:37.0	It is groundbreaking because for the first time we are demonstrating that depression is not only a disorder of the mind.
0:45.8	In fact, it's not even only a disorder of the brain, is a disorder of the whole body.
0:49.7	It is a really exciting advance and breakthrough. Every psychiatrist and every patient needs to be aware of this.
1:00.0	This is a program about betrayal by our fiercis protector. Our immune system
1:08.6	should always have our backs, but we'll uncover the revelatory new evidence that it can turn and unleash an assault on the brain.
1:17.0	I'm James Gallagher and in this edition of Discovery from the BBC,
1:21.0	we'll explore how these findings offer fresh prospects for treatment
1:24.7	for mental illness. But just as importantly, they're also a challenge to the idea that
1:30.0	psychiatric illness is all in the mind into our own expectations that people just
1:35.8	need to pull themselves together.
1:38.3	I hate that phrase.
1:39.3	Oh my goodness, if I could, I would, just as if someone had diabetes and their insulin that you know
1:44.8	that those levels weren't working correctly you wouldn't say I'll snap out of it
1:48.8	stop having a hypo but your body just simply isn't producing the right chemicals.
1:55.4	And it's exactly the same thing.
1:57.2	It's just for some reason people don't feel as valid.
	...

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