Understanding Disorders at the Cellular Level

Doctor Daniel Pine discusses the different approaches to understanding disorders and explains that we have a long way to go to understand them on the cellular level.

I think the important thing to say when we are trying to understand mental disorders relates to something that you just said which is that there are many levels at which we can look. We can take any one level and we can look at it very deeply, so we can look at brain structure very deeply or brain function very deeply or cognition and thinking very deeply or the behavior that we see in our office or out in our children’s environments. We can look at each one of those very deeply or we can kind of look broadly across those areas. It can be very confusing even for the scientist to try to both simultaneously look broadly across these levels but also look very deeply. The same is true when we tend to look cellularly. Right now, in terms of trying to understand the relationship between cellular function and mental disorders, we are really not at a place where we can do that. Where we are is that we can look at how cellular function relates to behavior in animals and we are making really a huge amount of progress in that area. So for example, we have been talking about fear-learning. We are learning quite a lot about what kind of changes go on in cells when relatively simple organisms even some mammals learn about fear and learn about danger, and that is kind of state-of-the-art right now and it is very exciting because again since we know that there are some important similarities between what happens in relatively simple animals and what happens in people when they learn about danger. Understanding cellular functions in simple animals could be very, very helpful, but again we are not at the place where we can use that information to understand anything very precise about people. We are definitely not at the place where we can use that information to do anything clinically, to predict what is going to happen to somebody or to choose a treatment for them.