D) To what extent can specialist branches of neuroscience effectively address mental health issues? Is Christian faith an asset of practical value if struggling with such challenges?

Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven published The Archaeology of the Mind in 2011, evidence of years of research with animals (Jaak was tagged ‘the rat tickler” for this reason!) identifying seven deep neural sources of our values and primary emotional feelings located in the upper part of the brain stem. Marc Solms, with others, has linked that research to an explication of the neuroscience of psychoanalysis, in The Brain and the Inner World in 2002
Panksepp calls these neural sources “basic emotion command systems”. As with bodily drive needs (hunger, thirst) and sensory reflex needs (withdrawal from a pin prick, pupils dilating), humans don’t have to learn these response systems, they are autonomic ‘gifts’ for our evolutionary survival and development. From the painstaking observation of nature such as by Panksepp, we know of the core values of our species. Panksepp uses capital letters to name these emotion command systems (and others have since followed him). They include SEEKING (from foraging to the associated pleasure-lust system, RAGE (from anger -rage system), FEAR (the fear-anxiety system) and PANIC (the separation – distress system).
That human development which derives from these responses, however, is learnt uniquely afresh by all persons. Each develops his or her own individual and unconscious assessment of encounters in their experience of their worlds (ourselves, others and the environment) as “good” or “bad”. In human development, each has their own individual and personal version of the world we experience and of all those we encounter, mapped internally. These memories, stored from this implicit learning, are unconscious but most certainly affect consciousness without our awareness. Then memory of how events are perceived in this core consciousness is related to how we replay interactions with things as good, bad or indifferent. That replay happens in reality and also in the reality of what is metaphorically our ‘mind’s eye’. It is the part of the brain known as the hippocampus that appears to link inner consciousness with the outer consciousness and keeps track of the value of what we know we experience.
Thus far all this is passive. Humans have however, a sense of ‘self’ as having ‘agency’. The brain stem structure gives us that experience of the awareness of ‘being alive’. But the basic emotion command system has outcomes that are autonomic (involuntary, without conscious effort) and compulsive. Motor programmes are triggered without choice and there is in this activity, no free-will.
Human beings however are genetically wired to develop the pre-frontal lobes which gives us the capacity (or free will) to inhibit the otherwise autonomic motor responses. The adult sophisticated response of the pre-frontal lobes developed in spurts when aged 2 and 5 predominantly and then for the rest of the first twenty years of life. This capacity develops to allow an action to be imagined whilst inhibiting the motor system response. The point here is that these learned responses are dependent on experience and our individual response to that experience emotionally (pre-conscious) and later cognitively (conscious) and we begin early in life to use language to encode that experience. Since this is primarily happening in early years, that encoding is heavily influenced by what caregivers do and say. This develops our own peculiar attachment patterns and a valuing of experience with which we enter adulthood.
The capacity to govern our own action systems that is not balanced or perhaps efficient, gives rise to a prolific range of ‘mental health’ conditions. To communicate what we observe of ourselves and others, names are given which attempt to group similar effects and behaviours such as anxiety and depression.
How does the ‘talking cure’ of psychotherapy work then? Research shows increasingly that improvement in mental health correlates with the ‘talking’ in a professional and a caring relationship. From a neurobiological perspective change is possible in the effectiveness of the autonomic emotional responses within the pre-frontal lobes. That change may be envisaged in the moment of inhibition when alternate action to a stimulus might be imagined. With the link to language mentioned above, the way our organism remembers can change.
For psychodynamic therapists and others familiar with the notion of ‘transference’, the link then to the therapeutic relationship comes into view. Research shows now that this relationship, in addition to recoding of a memory implied above, is in its special nature discovered to be therapeutic. My own summary of my work is that I have spent 30 years helping others find alternate constructs for what they are experiencing emotionally. As already remarked then, encoded experience is re-encountered in a safe relationship. Viewed and assimilated differently, the power of the unconsciously held affect is lessened.
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Another view of how the brain works requires understanding of ‘mirror’ neurons characterised often as ‘monkey see, monkey do’. It has been shown that mirror neurons firing in the brain of the parent (eating a banana for example) are mirrored precisely in the brain of the infant. That mirroring reflects the awareness that anticipates what happens next as an action commences, that of peeling a banana as a prelude to the experience of deliciousness in this case. Everything the therapist is when being fully in a therapeutic relationship with his or her client, all that is genuinely being thought of and expressed congruently as respect, honour and love for the other, is being mirrored and anticipated. One outcome is clear, the client ‘knows’ and feels deeply at best that they are safe to risk encounter with ‘bad’ emotions. Learning to shape the pre-frontal lobe activity to inhibit previously unconscious motor response to a ‘bad’ association can be experienced and the change process can happen.
It is, I suggest, in this last observation of the relationship that the challenge posed by the question at the beginning can begin to be answered. The summation that follows is my own personal way of expressing an understanding of being a therapist who is a Christian. I read Paul’s assertion that creation began in Christ. Paul wrote these astonishing statements in his letter as one who met with those who encountered the person of that Christ. The talking with Jesus Christ changed lives, a claim that does not require substantiation. The change was evident and encountered in them by Paul, changed his inner world and external action at the deepest level of his being.
When I move into that construct of our being in a created world, then I am believing that all other human beings are created in Christ and made for encounter with the Creator and His creation. If I regarded my clients in this way, then that might have allowed my love for them to glimpse a dimension or feel the dynamic of the love of God. If that were so, it would be the work of the Creator God in me that Christians call the activity of God the Creator as Holy Spirit, and this would be as a gift of Creation. God’s love for His creation led to Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection. I make such statements as they apply to myself. Yet, I suggest, the foregoing neuroscientific sketch, and the quotation from Colossians, allows the love of God to be observed to be therapeutic and/or redemptive and directly affecting what we call our ‘mental health’. If Paul intuited his theology in Colossians from encounter with those who had met with Jesus, and if my love is in any way a reflection of the love of Christ, then today’s neuroscience shows how human relationship can be therapeutic and even life transforming in the sense of health-giving.
We perhaps, do not need to look for the addition of any external entity or force to our biological and neurobiological understanding of the human being’s constitution. We do not need to find a theory of everything that explains how matter becomes consciousness, although we may well do so. The theological statement made here regarding creation is elegant and maybe enough. The Creator’s love formed us and given and experienced, that love assimilated and received as “good” continues to recreate us. Theologically that means recreate us and enhance the health of our world through us, in preparation for the coming of the Kingdom on earth when Jesus returns.

The treatment of mental illness has been revolutionised by neuroscience over the past 60 years. The discovery of effective and affordable drugs to treat people living with depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety and schizophrenia, for instance, has transformed the lives of millions of people around the world. Brain scanning technologies can map changes to the neural networks of the brain during illness and recovery and are powerful tools to study our cognitions, perceptions, memories and moods across the lifespan. Genetic studies, which examine variation in DNA sequence in health and disease, are extending our knowledge of the biology of many common disorders including psychosis, depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress, eating disorders, obsessions, addictions and more. It is reasonable to hope that progress in neuroscience will lead to improved interventions and preventative strategies for mental illness just as molecular genetics has already led to the discovery of remarkable new treatments for some cancers and infections including covid-19.
It can often be helpful for patients and relatives to describe depression or anxiety in terms of chemical imbalances in the brain, a formulation that relieves guilt and reduces stigma. Biological causal explanations bridge the imaginary divide between physical, psychological and social explanatory models of illness. Several brain imaging and gene expression studies involving patients who have responded well to psychotherapy, have identified plausible biological mechanisms, including changes in DNA methylation, that could mediate the therapeutic response, informatively discussed by Peter as the neuroscience of psychoanalysis.
In answer to question D, neuroscience is providing answers to many of the mysteries of mental health and it does not seem necessary or helpful, when treating mental illness, to try to make a distinction between body and mind. However this does not lead to some kind of materialist reductionism. Biological explanations have limits and although symptoms, signs and severity of moods, for instance, can be reliably analysed and quantified using self-report rating scales, neuroscience cannot measure or explain the first-person subjective experiences of someone who is depressed, happy or anxious. Nor can a scientific approach explain the personal meaning of our sensory experiences, or the beliefs and values we hold. Other approaches are required to understand human relationships and our relationship with God.