DESPITE extraordinary advances in many aspects of healthcare, mental health problems continue to pose a challenge.
This is partly because mental health services are under-funded but it is also because we still need to find more effective treatments.
One stumbling block has been that, too often, psychological and drug treatments have been seen as being in conflict. In reality, mind and brain are not separate – how our brains work affects who we are and what we do, while who we are and what we do in turn affects how our brains work.
Psychological therapies physically alter our brains in no less "real" a way than drug treatment does. Sometimes talking therapy will work best; sometimes more direct brain treatments; and sometimes, the most effective treatment will be a well-balanced combination of the two.
While we understand this in principle, in practice things are more complex. Each person with a mental health problem is an individual.
For example, each person with depression has unique social circumstances, unique psychological responses, and also unique features of their brain activity. This means that the idea that depression is due to imbalance of a single brain chemical, and that all that is needed is to correct that imbalance, is far too simplistic. We need a much more detailed picture of what is going on in the person's brain.
So far, brain imaging techniques like MRI have given us a promising broad-brush understanding of what is going on the brain in people with mental health problems, including depression, schizophrenia and ADHD. However, because each person's pattern of activity is unique, we cannot use that broad-brush picture to make reliable treatment decisions for each individual. We need to focus the picture.
MEG, or magnetoencephalography, is a promising brain imaging technique. A MEG scan is painless, noiseless and non-messy and provides rich information about the rapidly changing patterns of activity in different brain regions as our nerve cells communicate with each other.
With such rich information, we also need more sophisticated mathematics to tease out the crucial details of the patterns in each individual case. So there are still challenges ahead, but with techniques such as MEG and the number-crunching power of modern computers, we at last have the tools we need.