Points to consider in the issue of mental disorders

Tais Silveira Moriyama, specializing in child psychiatry, is our interviewee in this issue. Speaking about her specialty, she shows us some aspects of the diagnosis and treatment of the little ones, of which we highlight some points.

For a trend to become disease it always seems to have an "environmental trigger". The tendency would only exist in biological and psychological baggage (including past experiences), and the trigger would be an event or a sum of stressful or traumatizing events. Like a strained arc that does not withstand tension and breaks. But the prevalence is always, it seems to be, the baggage of past experiences. This baggage would be responsible for detonating the trigger. An arrangement, such as an inflammatory process or autoimmune condition, alone, would not dispense with a triggering factor.

If parents knew the tendencies or predispositions of their children's illness - and this knowledge is possible through interaction with the therapist - they could collaborate to redirect these tendencies by changing a course of morbidity to a health course. This is possible even in the case of medication use, such as when the schizophrenic develops the ability to identify the difference between normality, delirium and hallucination, making him / her discriminate and "get accustomed" to these manifestations. Although this is very difficult, because when it is freaked out, it is as if it were "another person", it is still possible, less when one enters the outbreak than when one comes out of the nightmare. In this process, "interpersonal support" is of fundamental importance.

Although the above-mentioned psychiatrist considers all mental morbidity and present suffering to be connected with the recent or remote past, she recalls that there are "mental disorders that can be imposed by organic changes in the brain." That is, its raison d'être is purely organic, as when it is the result of an accident or as a side effect of an infection, for example, without forgetting the role played by the law of action and reaction. In both cases there would be no disposition to the disease, nor repeated exposure to a stressful or traumatizing factor.

Once, the dr. was questioned about why the patient was hospitalized, and another, similar case, it was sheltered by the family, another psychiatrist said that, there being no tendency to violence in both cases, the family makes all the difference. According to her, interpersonal support is certainly a potent factor in promoting mental health. When, on the contrary, there is no interpersonal support, it is like drifting the little heart to the sea of unrestrained tendencies. And when, which is much worse, the environment is unhealthy, the case is almost doomed to quench. "Dysfunctional families are sometimes genetically diseased families whose members have small imbalances that add up provokes great difficulties in relationships."

Since psychiatry and psychology have joined forces because there was a time when they were mutually exclusive, it has come to the conclusion that mental disorder is the result of competition from many organic and psychological “risk factors” difficult to separate from each other.

Today it is quite clear that life experiences leave biological marks on the brain. Thus, "from the spirit point of view we can understand that the experiences of the spirit leave marks in the body".