Simplicity

The idea that mental health disorders can be catalogued in a single volume book, like the DSM, and that for many of these disorders there is a simple chemical fix, has always struck me as simplistic: overly absurdly simplistic. For something as complex as a brain, the idea that problems can be remedied in such a simple fashion has almost always rang alarm bells in my head. Eventually I did grudgingly accept that I need the medication I am on, or at least something like it. I hope to explain elsewhere the reasoning process that led to this acceptance. But my intent here is to compare the simplicity of what I (and others) term the 'medical model', that of observe-diagnose-treat, with the sheer complexity of the brain and Mind. I often draw on analogies with computer science and mathematics. In the case of computers, they are the only man-made devices with a mind-boggling complexity that can be likened to that of the brain. (I don't want to get into questions of how comparable computers and brains are, since that is a whole topic in itself, and one which presents more questions than answers. What I want to do is to show that once things get complex, naive approaches can easily be seen to fail. In the case of computers, we can conduct detailed thought experiments where we have what is tantamount to total knowledge: we can potentially explicitly set up everything, and can potentially know everything about how certain procedures are performed, whereas with the brain we know very little about how it works once we get past the behaviour of individual neurons.)