Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Mental disorders are brain disorders – here’s why that matters

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

There's a lot of overlap between education and psychology, and therefore also a lot of overlap between different approaches to these two subjects. Take a disorder such as depression, for example. What causes it? Is it entirely internal, or do external factors matter? And if external factors matter, can we treat it with external remedies, like counseling? There's a lot we don't know here, and it doesn't help that sometimes widely separate treatments - psychotherapy versus antidepressants, say - produce similar results. But this (from my perspective) masks the difference between being able to manage the symptoms versus treating the symptoms - between, say, being able to cope with a feeling of sadness, versus being able to remove that feeling of sadness. Different types of learning (probably) result in different types of changes as well. Which is why we (intuitively) say that being about to talk about something is very different from being able to do something.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 26, 2024 2:07 p.m.

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