Can mental illness start in your immune system?
5 June 2018
In his new book The Inflamed Mind Ed Bullmore reflects on a patient he treated with rheumatoid arthritis and depression. Bullmore's boss thought she was depressed because she was thinking about this chronic inflammatory disease. But what if her depression was caused by it? There's a growing body of evidence, he argued at the Hay Festival, linking depression and inflammation.
The link between arthritis and depression
Ed Bullmore reflects on a patient he treated when he was a young doctor
Where philosophy and medicine meet
17th Century French philosopher René Descartes was a dualist, believing our bodies and minds to be separate entities.
In Britain in 2018, the NHS is still planned on Cartesian lines.Ed Bullmore
Ed Bullmore thinks that the legacy of this concept is evident to this day.
He writes: "The body is the domain of the physician and knowable by physics and other sciences.
"The mind is the domain of the psychiatrist or psychologist and knowable only by introspective guesswork, or by inference from behaviour.
"In Britain in 2018, the NHS is still planned on Cartesian lines. Patients literally go through different doors, attend different hospitals, to consult differently trained doctors, about their dualistically divided bodies."
Bullmore has also said that while more long-term research was needed, there were more immediate steps that could be taken.
During a question and answer session following his talk at Hay, he argued: "If I've got a mental health symptom arising because of a physical disorder like arthritis, I've got to be seen by two different doctors who're never going to join it up.
"I don't see really how we couldn't lobby for some sort of reconfiguration of services so you've got physical and mental health service coherently providing to patients in the same clinic at the same time in a more integrated way.
"That's not rocket science, that doesn't need billions of dollars going into new drug development."
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More about the links between the immune system and depression.
A Berlin Wall around the brain?
New evidence shows that the body and the brain are not as separate as was once thought
The Inflamed Mind is published by Short Books. Edward Bullmore is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge as well as working for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust and GlaxoSmithKline.
If you are urgently worried about mental health, you should let a trusted friend or relative know and contact a health professional, like your GP or NHS 111. You can also call the Samaritans for free on 116 123 or go to your nearest A&E department.
