Cafe Mythbusting: The neuroscience of mental health disorders

At a café in Kolkata, a gang of PhD dropouts talks about the neuroscience of mental health with their psychiatrist-friend.

Psychiatry is a branch of medicine and the Siamese twin of neurology. In an alternate universe of multiverse, where Freud was an nobel laureate writer and not a doctor, brain would have had a single medical discipline to treat it and a single surgical discipline to manage it. And that single medical discipline would have had both neurology and synaptology(mistakenly known as psychiatry) as it’s subspeciality.

Sadly in this particular universe of multiverse Freud was a doctor. And so we are living with fractured halfs of one single medical discipline of brain. And so symptoms of psychiatry given psychological explanation although psychology is a completely separate discipline. This situation needs fundamental change in understanding of psychiatrists about brain and they need to see their subject through light of brain.

This is one such attempt by us. Arghya Manna is a molecular biologist Cum cartoonist, Souparno Adhikary is a biophysicist and I’m a psychiatrist. This is a project to create that awareness. Funded by India Alliance. Let’s hope we can continue to do this in future and form this as a series.