The numbers on mental illness in Canada are alarming. Lost productivity because of it is measured at $14.4 billion. Ten per cent of Canadians reported symptoms of dependence and mental disorder in the last year. And the WHO predicts depression and its effects will only worsen within the next decade.
These, and other numbers, were some of the statistics used by Dr. Remi Quirion, Scientific Director of the Douglas Hospital Research Centre at McGill, in his talk “Mental Illnesses and Addiction” last Friday as part of the Gairdner Foundation Lectures.
With as many as 500 publications and 15,000 citations, Quirion has made it his goal to bring the study of mental disease “into the realm of neuroscience,” and to better understand and remove the stigmas of mental illnesses.
“It’s very common to have colleagues around us who suffer from mental illness and some form of addiction. We have to find ways to help them, and one way is to recognize it better,” he said.
Quirion has concentrated on neurodevelopment models of schizophrenia. It’s known that mice with brain lesions show schizophrenic-like behaviour, such as hyper-activity to stress, once they reach maturity. Quirion’s group was able to induce similar behaviour without lesions by injecting chemicals in unborn mice.
“We think we’re on [to] something here and that we’re improving an animal model that may reproduce some aspects of schizophrenia” and lead to new insights, he said.
Quirion hopes to slow down the process of Alzheimer’s, another common mental illness, by examining its biochemistry. Specifically, he is currently investigating the chemical interactions involved in the maintenance of acetylcholine, a chemical important to the development of Alzheimer’s. It’s hoped that a chemical understanding will better merge the many explanations now circulating.
But before that, Quirion says the time is ripe for psychiatry and neurology to merge into a more fruitful synthesis. “It’s time to put these two brain related specialties together. That way we’ll be able to make more progress.”
