Spooling The Tangles

There has been a spurt of new drugs for diabetes and cancer treatment in ­recent years. Those with neuropsychiatric diseases, however, have been left behind as advances in psychiatric pharmacology have not kept pace.

- Arushi Bedi

Manny: “I guess I was hoping for a miracle.”
Attendant: “It happens but it takes time.”
Manny (to his wife): “Rose…?”
Attendant: “She’s not listening now.”

—The Wrong Man, Alfred Hitchcock

YES, it’s taking time. Over half a century has passed since this 1956 film, where a gloomy protagonist leaves his wife Rose behind in the asylum, staring vacantly out of the window—her bare room an allegory for the white funk of her mind. In all these years, countless scenes like this one would have unfolded on screen and in real life—only superficialities separating them, and a mind-numbing sameness marking their essence. Why so? Most branches of medicine are miles away from where they stood in the 1950s, in depth of understanding, diagnostic perfection and targeted intervention. But with mental illness, it’s as if science is still staring vacantly, like Rose, at a formless white fog outside the window.

The contrast is striking. AI is upon us, machines are beginning to self-learn, information systems modelled on the human brain’s neural pathways have changed the world. But the mysteries of the human mind are as impenetrable as ever. We don’t fully know how it gets things right. So to zero in on what has gone wrong—and then to fix it—is like shooting in the dark. That’s why Dr David J. Anderson, a neurobiologist working at the California Institute of Technology, summed up the situation, during a recent interview in India, with these stark words: “There hasn’t been a fundamentally new neuropsychiatric drug in the last 50 years”.