In tune with better access to mental care, the Government of Saskatchewan and Family Services Saskatchewan recently announced free, rapid counselling services to Moose Jaw and seven other communities.
This comes after the Canadian Mental Health Association released a report on the effect of the pandemic on mental health, where anxiety and stress are said to have spiked.
The Saskatchewan provincial budget takes on mental health with $403 million and addiction with $67 million, with investments, among others, in “The addition of new addictions treatment spaces with $2.1 million to support the first year of a three-year commitment to add 150 spaces across Saskatchewan. Province-wide implementation of the mental health and addictions information system supported by a $1.0 million investment. Expansion of the Mental Health Capacity-Building in Schools Program to additional schools throughout the province with $800,000 in new funding”.
Recently, three Saskatchewan Polytechnic researchers received a total of $350K grant from the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation (SHRF) Establishment Grants, “for healthcare research, including for projects in areas of mental health, caregiver resources and older adult loneliness.”
There are advocates of mental health requesting that more should be done against stigmatization while encouraging those in need of help to come forward.
There is progress in mental health and addiction care in Saskatchewan, but gaps, like in the rest of Canada and North America, widen with the complexities of the brain.
In the United States, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Thomas Insel, wrote a book “Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health”, where he expressed an interaction, during the Q&A session with a large group of family members: ‘You really don’t get it, my 23-year-old son has schizophrenia. He has been hospitalized five times, made three suicide attempts, and now he is homeless. Our house is on fire and you are talking about the chemistry of the paint. What are you doing to put out this fire?”
He said he had been describing, “stem cell studies of neurons in schizophrenia, research in mapping specific genetic variants for autism, and models on the epigenetics of stress and depression”, when he realized the limits of those advances to expedient therapy.
Though mental illnesses are multifarious, what, in the basic sense is mind, or mental?
What are the components of both that determine health or illness? Those, if structured, could lay tracks in the brain, to understand what they do or how they interact.
Mind or mental can be proposed to be comprised of thought and memory. Thought is the transport, memory is the location. It is where thoughts go across the memory that determines what to remember, understand, feel-like and so on, at least theoretically.
Thought and memory are also the experiential basis for drug addiction, such that when some use, thoughts [seem to] travel elsewhere from destinations of being down, feeling-like heaviness, worried, anxious, irritable and so on.
Though there are cellular and molecular mechanisms of drug dependence, but the poles, theoretically, are thought and memory.
The memory picks up actual feelings, before it brings what it means to feel-like something, resulting in wanting more — regardless of risks.
In brain science, it is said that neurons power thoughts, but thoughts are not neurons and thoughts are not rendered by neuroimaging.
Seeking out how thoughts emerge and transport across the brain could become a potential toolkit in every mental condition and addiction intervention, to show the individual and loved ones where thoughts are, and what that might mean.
In neuroscience, it is established that all sensory inputs go to the thalamus, except smell, which goes to the olfactory bulb. Those landing areas are where sensory processing—in the brain—occurs, before relay to other parts of the cerebral cortex for interpretation.
This means that senses land somewhere, gets processed and proceeds for interpretation.
It is theorized that sensory processing or sensory integration in the thalamus and olfactory bulb is into a uniform unit or a uniform quantity, which is thought or a form of thought. It is this quantity — thought, that becomes the equivalent or representation or version of senses that go on to be interpreted.
Interpretation is postulated to be knowing, feeling and reaction. Knowing is memory. The memory stores thought or its form — as the emerged quantity of sensory processing. Stores are in the smallest possible unit of unique information on anything, but similarities between stores are grouped.
This means that since several kinds of cars, doors, chairs, shoes, words, scents, birthdays and so on are known, each one is stored in the smallest possible unique form, and whatever is common between stores is grouped.
During activities and interactions, stores relay from group to group in the memory. After thought leaves a store in memory locations, it heads for the destination for actual feelings, followed by reactions — which can be parallel or perpendicular. To feel anything, thoughts have to get somewhere. This makes thought the activator at destinations.
Thoughts can come from sensory processing or from memory, but they go around for affect.
All these theoretical descriptions can be used to simulate what thought might be doing, or memory in any case of mental health and substance abuse. There are conversations on biopsychosocial approach to mental care, but thoughts and memory are always present.
Thought transport can be displayed in a theoretical architecture as an addition to existing methods—for progress across mental conditions within Saskatchewan and beyond.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
