Is Mental Health ready to start transitioning towards measurable brain circuits, away from subjective symptoms?

To Diag­nose Men­tal Ill­ness, Read the Brain (Sci­en­tif­ic American):

Although sci­en­tists have learned a lot about the brain in the last few decades, approach­es to treat­ing men­tal ill­ness­es have not kept up. As neu­ro­sci­en­tists learn more about brain cir­cuits, Stan­ford psy­chi­a­trist Amit Etkin fore­sees a time when diag­noses will be based on brain scans rather than symp­toms…(Etkin says that) We under­stand behav­ior is essen­tial­ly under­pinned by brain cir­cuits. That is, there are cir­cuits in the brain that deter­mine cer­tain types of behav­iors and cer­tain types of thoughts and feel­ings. That’s prob­a­bly the most use­ful way of orga­niz­ing brain func­tion. If you can start char­ac­ter­iz­ing cir­cuit dis­rup­tions for com­pen­sato­ry symp­toms at an indi­vid­ual sub­ject lev­el and then link that to how you can pro­vide inter­ven­tions, then you can get away com­plete­ly from diag­noses and can inter­vene with brain func­tion in a direct­ed way.

Relat­ed arti­cle: Men­tal Ill­ness – One Treat­ment to Cure Them All, One Net­work to Bind Them? (Brain­Blog­ger):

Imag­ine: A cure all for ALL men­tal ill­ness­es… sounds illog­i­cal, per­haps impos­si­ble, some­thing straight out of fan­ta­sy, no? Well, at the Sharp­Brains Vir­tu­al Sum­mit, Mon­i­tor­ing & Enhanc­ing Brain Health in the Per­va­sive Neu­ro­science Era, where pre­sent­ing cut­ting-edge inno­v­a­tive research was the norm, I was lucky to be wit­ness to a tru­ly tan­ta­liz­ing talk by psy­chol­o­gist Dr. Madeleine Good­kind that will like­ly change your per­spec­tive. As Dr. Good­kind explains, even with­in one men­tal ill­ness, there are vast­ly diverse com­bi­na­tions of symp­toms and respons­es to treat­ment, as well as comor­bity (i.e. shared symp­toms) with many oth­er disorders…So instead of focus­ing on symp­toms, Dr. Good­kind and cowork­ers looked to the source of the riv­er and iden­ti­fied “…three regions of the brain that com­mon­ly have decreased vol­umes across psy­chi­atric ill­ness­es, the left and right bilat­er­al ante­ri­or insu­la, and the dor­sal ante­ri­or cin­gu­late cortex…there are under­ly­ing brain deficits that may be present that we can address first to make treat­ment more effective.”

To Learn more:

• Q: What do peo­ple with schiz­o­phre­nia, bipo­lar dis­or­der, depres­sion, addic­tion, obses­sive-com­pul­sive dis­or­der, and anx­i­ety have in com­mon? A: A brain with sim­i­lar gray-mat­ter loss
• Slid­edeck by Dr. Good­kind and others: