For my chapter 2 first impression, I chose to watch the Ted Talk called “Toward a New Understanding of Mental Illness.” I chose to watch this because now a days in the media everyone is talking about mental illnesses and how it can affect people in many different ways. I think that it’s a good topic to bring up so that people are aware of what can happen to people who have mental illnesses.
In the talk, Thomas Insel talks about how doctors have been able to decrease the amount of people who have Leukemia, Heart Disease, AIDS, and Strokes through medication and getting the people who is experiencing that problem to the hospital quickly. Early detection and early intervention will help people not be disabled after coming out of the hospital. He wants to see if it’s a possibility to lessen it with depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia to see if it lowers the amount of suicides a year.
The most interesting thing I found out about was that there are 38,000 suicides a year, 1 about every 15 minutes and it’s mostly people between the ages of 15-25. I also found it interesting how there are less car accident deaths and less homocides than suicide deaths. I think that mental illnesses and suicides sometimes aren’t see as important as they really are.
I think that Thomas Insel was very trustworthy. He stated that he even worked for the government and that “you all” meaning the audience, pays him to do the work that he does. His actual job title is the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health. His job is to make sure that we are moving in the right direction for lessening the amount of mental disorders and how we can treat them. I also think that his research that he did was very professional and he had graphs and brain scans to show the difference between the way someone looks with depression versus someone that has schizophrenia. Having that background and research to help support what he was saying was helpful.
A research study that we could conduct could include looking at brain scans of people who have mental illnesses and people who don’t have mental illnesses. My research question would be: Does someone with anxiety have similar brain scans to someone who has depression? For doctors to see symptoms early and start fixing the problem before anything serious happens, you can take a brain scan of multiple ages, especially the 15-25 age range where most suicide happens. The study of course would have to be longitudinal and be over a long period of time as you want to see if the people are improving or not.
Tiffany'sCollegeBlog 
As we learned in class, many mental illnesses are linked to the environment, biology, and potential brain damage. Scientists often wonder if changes in the brain are the cause of mental illness or the result of mental illness. It’s the classic question: “What comes first, the chicken or the egg?”. However, it difficult to conclude a cause and effect relationship between changes in the brain and mental illnesses because we cannot perform true experiments. For example, we know that people with depression are not producing enough serotonin, but we cannot perform experiments either randomly assigning people to be put in distressing situations or give them drugs that decrease their serotonin production. Depression is commonly thought to be caused by environmental factors, though we cannot be totally sure. In contrast, schizophrenia is theorized to be caused by abnormal genes or brain chemistry. Therefore, it is possible that it can be detected before behavior symptoms become present, as Insel mentions in the video. We have many different methods of scanning the brain through neuroimaging such as EEGs, PETs, and fMRIs that analyze the brain’s structure and activity. Your research question is interesting. Before this chapter, I had no clue as to how anxiety and depression relate to different parts of the brain. Now we know that people with depression show a decrease in a certain type of neurotransmitter, while people with anxiety usually have issues with their amygdala in their limbic system.
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