It seemed a bit of a cop-out digging into the archives for my first post so I figured this next one had to be new. Of course it’s not completely new since I had the actual idea a little while ago, but other than some quick notes in my organiser I haven’t put this one “on paper” (an odd phrase in this digital context). I worked out this idea in a debate with my wife and a colleague of hers. A lot of my ideas develop this way; in a conversation something someone says sparks a notion so I say it. Usually people disagree, or are at least sceptical, and so in defending my new idea, I work out it’s details. Moments like that are a major reason why I like conversations so much. But I digress, to my idea:

The study of mental illness is a relatively new field. Although people have always had mental illnesses and so there have always been attempts to cure them, the actual systematic study essentially started with Freud. This is very recent when compared with the systematic study of physical illnesses (eg the basics of recognising infection were set out in Ancient Greece). Interestingly, like the early medicine, clinical psychology is almost entirely symptom based. Theories of underlying causes are mostly absent or pure speculation.

What I mean is that up until the discoveries of bacteria and viruses, many illnesses had been categorised based on symptoms, and risk factors for contracting them had been to some extent identified, but the actual causes such as bacterial infection were not known. This meant there could be no final certainty of diagnosis and was a substantial limitation on research. Currently mental illnesses are in that situation, creating similar difficulties for the science.

Some may argue that there is no psychological equivalent to bacteria, but I would respond that since the concept of bacteria was inconceivable to ancient medicine, it may well be that an equivalent currently inconceivable discovery is yet to be made for clinical psychology. However, arguing that something exists but we just can’t understand it, is a fairly lame argument. (The same criticism could be levelled at most theologies, but that’s an issue I may get back to some other time.) So, I’ll give an example of the sort of thing that may be an underlying cause.

In the final chapter of the book “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins (a fascinating and very influential book) he coins the concept of “memes“. It’s a little difficult to explain the concept briefly but I’ll do my best.

Genes are self-perpetuating chemical patterns, their forms cause the animal they are part of to exhibit certain physical characteristics and those characteristics have a survival value. Similarly, memes are self-perpetuating mental patterns, their forms cause the person they are part of to exhibit certain mental characteristics which have a survival value. Memes are replicating ideas and can be as mundane as a tune that gets stuck in people’s heads, or as important as a new religion or philosophy that sweeps across the world.

So perhaps certain memes are responsible for mental illness. For example, helplessness and hopelessness are regarded as characteristic of depression. Perhaps an underlying pattern of thinking and ideas, a meme, is responsible for this mental state. Or perhaps several different memes are responsible. What we now know as “depression” may in the future be regarded as a set of distinct illnesses with similar symptoms (in the same way that “falling sickness” in ancient times included a range of disorders that caused fainting or seizures).

This is what I mean be purely symptom based clinical science limiting research. Unless we have some method of certain and objective diagnosis, we may not really know what we are dealing with. Psychopathology is rife with the potential for this. Two examples: the range of different symptoms in schizophrenia may indicate that there are separate illnesses present; the high-co-morbidity of personality disorders may be because they are different expressions of the same illness.

I’m not saying that memes necessarily are the underlying cause of mental illness. I’m giving them as an example to show that an underlying cause is possible. Although psychology usually seems like a fully fledged dicipline, in my opinion it is an area of knowledge still in its infancy and the identification of some objectively verifiable underlying cause for mental illnesses would be one way for it to take its first steps as a mature field of study.