By David Stephen who looks at AI and Telehealth in this guest post.

There is a new book, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, with the summary, "At age fourteen, Laura Delano saw her first psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant. Delano's initial diagnosis marked the beginning of a life-altering saga. For the next thirteen years, she sought help from the best psychiatrists and hospitals in the country, accumulating a long list of diagnoses and a prescription cascade of nineteen drugs. After some resistance, Delano accepted her diagnosis and embraced the pharmaceutical regimen that she'd been told was necessary to manage her incurable, lifelong disease. But her symptoms only worsened. Eventually doctors declared her condition so severe as to be "treatment resistant." After years of faithful psychiatric patienthood, Delano realized there was one thing she hadn't tried - leaving behind the drugs and diagnoses.

This decision would mean unlearning everything the experts had told her about herself and forging into the terrifying unknown of an unmedicated life."

What, in the brain, becomes altered to result in a serious mental illness? Could AI map the mind and its alteration? If mind is assumed to be the same as mental, what is normal for the mind, to result in regular social and occupational functioning and what is abnormal to disrupt those?

Theoretical Brain Science

In the evidence, since decades of neuroscience research, the closest cells to how the mind works are neurons. However, neurons [for all they are said to do] never function without their signals: electrical and chemical. When neurons are said to fire or be active, electrical signals are involved and chemical signals as well, in general.

AI for Telehealth Therapy Without Medications

So, if the way the mind [or mental] works is to be understood for normal or otherwise, it is possible to describe it with neurons plus their electrical and chemical signals.

Neurons are cells, like several others across the body. Their anatomy is near fixed, so it is unlikely that neurons can by themselves represent the memory of anything. This means that a neuron may not change shape to [re]present an emotion or have another for a feeling. Even in a cluster, it is unlikely that neurons would have shapes for every memory, given the large amount of memory a human may have, through the years - ranging from education, to places, people, objects, and so forth. The time it would take to change shape and the energy would be disruptive.

Simply, neurons, either singular or in clusters are unable to represent memory, emotion, feelings or regulation of internal senses, with shapes or by changing shapes. If this were the case, why would electrical signals have the ability to transport the shape of a cluster of neurons to another cluster, and what would the roles of chemical signals be?

To develop a concept of how the human mind works, the likeliest candidates [within the evidence in neuroscience] are the electrical and chemical signals. Not an individual electrical signal or a singular chemical signal, but electrical and chemical signals as sets or loops, available in clusters of neurons.

So, every function is approximately a particular assemblage, configuration or formation of electrical and chemical signals in a set. This means that to know what a table is, differently from a window or a fan, is to have electrical and chemical signals assembled in a particular way, in interaction. Electrical and chemical signals have to interact. Electrical signals, in a set, strike for the formation available at the set of chemical signals. The instance of the strike is when memory is produced, or emotion, or feelings, or regulation of internal organs, conceptually.

Also, sets of electrical signals and sets of chemical signals often have their states while interacting. These states grade or measure the extents to...