Sedona, AZ — May is Mental Health Awareness Month, an event that has been marked since 1949. The American Psychiatric Association—responsible for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—just concluded their annual meeting for 2024, from May 4 – 8. A new paper in Science, A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution, about mapping the brain, stated that “a cubic millimeter of human temporal cortex contains about 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and about 150 million synapses and comprises 1.4 petabytes.”
There has been a lot of mental health in the news in recent years. There have also been lots of push backs. One problem is that it is currently impossible to measure mental health. Surveys, observations and questionnaires are used for assessments, but there is no way to diagnose or test mental health—biologically.
Seeking this to the closest possible approximation, it is important to know how it is mechanized. How does mental health work? When someone is glad because something went well or dour because it did not, what went on? What is the difference between an interim state and a persistent one? What happens in severe cases?
The CDC, NIMH and SAMHSA described mental health as, “our emotional, psychological, and social well-being”. The American Psychological Association described it as “a state of mind characterized by emotional well-being, good behavioral adjustment, relative freedom from anxiety and disabling symptoms, and a capacity to establish constructive relationships and cope with the ordinary demands and stresses of life.” The American Psychiatric Association said that “mental illnesses are health conditions involving changes in emotion, thinking or behavior (or a combination of these). Mental illnesses can be associated with distress and/or problems functioning in social, work or family activities.”
What is emotional, psychological and social well-being? What is good behavioral adjustment? What is thinking or behavior? Where are they based? Wherever they are based, what are their components and how can those components be measured? If something is good for mental health, how come? If it is bad, how so? If the environment or a situation plays a role in mental state, how does it get in to drive affect?
If mental health is a state of mind, what is the mind? Where is it? What the mind does is commonly used to describe what the mind is, but if it does things [think, feel and so on] then it has to be something, so what is it?
Across brain science, all key functions do not just involve neurons, they involve signals. Simply, all memory, emotions, feelings, regulation of internal senses involves the electrical and chemical signals of neurons. Neurons are established to be in clusters across the central and peripheral nervous systems. Neurons are cells, they do not have parts that decide happiness or that carry information of physics or economics. If neurons are not the mind, what else can be explored to be the mind?
The NIH stated that, “At least a third of the approximately 20,000 different genes that make up the human genome are active (expressed) primarily in the brain.” However, when genes are expressed in experiences, they do not do so directly like the nucleotides are storing words in a language or directly deciding when to get angry. Conceptually, the power they wield is ultimately wheeled by the electrical and chemical signals—which retain some veto power, because they operate in loops.
It is postulated here that the human mind is the collection of all the electrical and chemical signals of neurons, with their interactions and features, in sets. This means that the signals are the basis for how information is organized. Information, or functions, or experiences, are mechanized by signals. Therefore, to learn something or get it into memory, signals are involved, to recall what is already in memory, signals are involved.
It is theorized that signals have a formation or configuration across centers in the brain with which they hold or organize information. These formations specify differences between types of emotions, feelings, memory and regulation.
Brain science has established that chemical signals are molecules, dominated by neurotransmitters—though there are others like neuropeptides. Electrical signals are ions.
Conceptually, the functions [memory, emotions, and others] are graded or qualified by features, resulting in what becomes useful in the moment. Simply, all functions get qualified, determining how experiences proceed. Features include attention, awareness, self or subjectivity and intentionality or free will.
In summary, the mind is the electrical and chemical signals of neurons. These signals mechanize functions as well as grade them. Mental health is conceptually a direct mechanism of the mind. Since it is difficult to measure the volume of neurotransmitters—or the density of ions—in sets, it is possible to use the functions and features as standards to grade mental health, in the closest stretch yet for what is ongoing, within.
How Might Mental Health Be Measured?
Aside from the central features that qualify functions, there are others, conceptually, like splits, principal spot and so forth. They play roles in determining states of mind in any instance.
Principal spot, for example, is responsible for the heaviness in a depression or the recurrence of intrusive thoughts, panic, anxiety or worries. It can be described as a location on the mind where a set of signals get to and take extreme attention—dominating everything else—while there. This location could mean a volume reach, of molecules—outsizing others.
It is proposed that a way to measure mental state is by functions and features. An emotion is a function, it could be fear, panic, hurt, delight, sadness and so forth. It may also be other variety—though loosely associated with emotions—like major depression. Features could be attention on it, intentionality or arrays. Arrays are leads for a set to others. They also play roles for non-intent.
Tough cases like delusions, hallucinations, thought disorders, mania, delirium and so on can be described as features that have gone askew, on the function—memory. Usually, there is distribution [a feature] on the mind, to know what is real or not, but with delusions, hallucinations or thought disorder, distribution is impaired, so what should feedback that something is not real does not, resulting in false beliefs.
Although, consciousness is already propounded to be equal to 1, mental health is proposed to range on an inequality number line of -0.5 to +0.5.
-0.2 to + 0.2 are areas of near balance, with anything outside of those, within disorders, especially when they persist. Sadness, unhappiness, hurt, anger, hate, fear, panic, irritation, frustration, desperation can be assumed to be negative emotions [functions], which could be around -0.3 to 0, as features grade them.
When these emotions linger, that is, acted on longer by attention, arrays [for non-intent] or the principal spot, they may get to -0.4. Serious cases like major depression, anxiety, hallucinations, delirium and others may get into -0.45, during intense episodes.
Happiness, delight, curiosity, pleasure, rewards, anticipation, craving and so forth may range from 0 to +0.2, but with substance use, mania, echolalia, it may get up to +0.4.
-0.1 to +0.1 on the number line can be described as normal mental health, or good mood—not too happy or sad—but just fair balance
How do they all apply? There are numerous functions, with divisions and subdivisions. Qualifiers act on all of them, but some qualifiers take a chunk of the fraction, like they do for consciousness, to place or grade functions. This means that per instance about three or four qualifiers may have the largest influence on functions, for mental health.
It is with this that estimates can be developed to grade what is happening within, given how functions are tuned within the range of average or away—with cumulative duration.
A key usefulness of this scale could be for checks by the self and loved ones, for prodrome, to seek help immediately, against allowing something to fester, then perhaps get worse, before reaching out. It may also be useful to place counters, aside from measures. For example, if attention is too much on something, how can it be diverted? If there is no distribution to something in reality, how can there be some sensory input to bolster it?
It will also be useful to reduce stigma, so that mechanistic understanding is scaled and support recommendation is normalized, against hidden self-harm or acting out against others. There are also cases of miscalculation, after calling for help, which the scale may be useful to assess—initially—from a distance, to explore a better approach, against certain outcomes.
The debate over how social media and smartphones may be affecting mental health can also be graded for instances of mood, defined by qualifiers.
Why is this scale plausible? The same can be asked about how the human mind works. There are several memories in the mind, but only a few come to attention or awareness per moment. Attention or less than attention [awareness] can be described as qualifiers of the memory of the moment. Several emotions or feelings are possible, yet only a few are presented—given situations—showing the roles of qualifiers, which could include intent or thick sets. There are cases where an individual is focused on something, then something else comes up and the previous thing is totally ignored—pointing to qualifiers moving away.
It is possible to have the memory of something in one moment result in trauma and no trauma, in another. This can be described as a qualification of distribution. If the trauma lingers, it may be attention on it—or the principal spot.
There could be cases of mental disorders where qualifiers are acting awry, or appear suspended, like the self, intent or awareness, resulting in cases of hallucination. This means that to calculate mental state, it is possible to know what qualifier is added or subtracted from the range, to estimate where the mind is—roughly.
This is conceptual and can be disseminated by AI, but directed as a step towards advancing from the current state, as well as possibility to use it for all the conditions in the DSM-5-TR.
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