Using the Brain’s Fight-or-Flight Response to Predict, Prevent and Recover from Mental Illness during NASA’s Deep Space Missions
Issue:
Volume 2, Issue 4, July 2013
Pages:
31-51
Received:
10 August 2013
Published:
30 August 2013
Abstract: The cause(s) and cure(s) of mental illness eludes the medical health industry allowing today’s pharmaceutical industry to drive the treatment for all people with mental illness using drugs that minimize the symptoms allowing people to return to the lifestyle that exacerbated it. It is more profitable for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs to treat the symptoms than cure or prevent mental illnesses. Deep space missions provide a harsh environment for astronauts, one that may increase the rate and severity of mental illness. Mental illness has been reported by astronauts in low earth orbit and some astronauts have become severely mentally after resuming other responsibilities. Looking at mental illness using electrical engineering, communications science and predictive science, the effects on the brain can be better quantified and understood in defining the cause, prevention and the recovery from mental illness if it is acquired during a deep space mission. This paper proposes that a person’s fight-or-flight response be used to explain the cause, prevention and recovery from mental illness due to no other available model in the mental health community. By accepting the FOFR as the cause of mental illness, it can also be used to explain the cause of most other diseases through its control of a person’s immune system when activated. Each time a person’s immune system is suppressed by the FOFR, it increases the likelihood of contracting a viral illness including cancer and many other diseases the immune system paralyzes. The results of this paper can be applied for general use by encouraging pharmaceutical companies to develop the drugs necessary to suppress the FOFR and subsequently stop the onset of most viral diseases, cancer and mental illness; much as drugs are used to suppress a person’s immune system to treat autoimmune diseases.
Abstract: The cause(s) and cure(s) of mental illness eludes the medical health industry allowing today’s pharmaceutical industry to drive the treatment for all people with mental illness using drugs that minimize the symptoms allowing people to return to the lifestyle that exacerbated it. It is more profitable for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs to...
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