The Mind-Brain Connection: How Mental Health Impacts Neurological Conditions

Serious brain injuries and disorders, such as epilepsy, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease, often cause serious mental health problems like anxiety, depression and brain fog.

That’s because the brain — an organ of the nervous system with specific structures — and the mind — the locus of our thoughts, perception and memory — are distinct but inseparable.

Understanding the connection between mental health conditions and neurological disorders can help you determine your next step when you are struggling.

Manage Stress and Mood To Improve Neurological Well-Being

Nearly 1 in 7 people worldwide live with a mental health disorder, and while most mental health issues develop independently of a brain disorder, they can also arise from one.

Problems like depression and anxiety are common after a traumatic brain injury, stroke or other serious neurological diagnosis as patients struggle to deal with life changes their illness requires and fears about disease progression.

Mental health issues also may arise due to damage in the brain from the neurological disorder. For example, some patients experience dramatic personality changes, becoming impulsive, irritable or apathetic, after a traumatic brain injury. They also may have changes in attention, ability to process and retain information.

Integrating Mind and Brain Care

Neurology (the study of the brain) and psychiatry (the study of the mind) developed separately but are now merging into teams of experts with integrated skills to care for your brain and mental health. This change recognizes that neurological and psychiatric diseases often coexist and share underlying causes.

Neurologists are the medical doctors who diagnose and treat brain injury, disease or disorder. But they now work with specialists who help treat the mind, including psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists and neuropsychologists.

Within this team of experts, the neuropsychologist’s role is to assess your mood and thinking skills after a brain injury or neurological diagnosis, especially if you have brain fog, anxiety or depression.

The neuropsychologist performs a detailed assessment to determine how much the disease or disorder is affecting your ability to think clearly, learn and remember, and to handle the anxiety that normally follows a serious medical diagnosis.

Through a series of questions and tests, the neuropsychologist compares your performance to the average person of your age, education and background on measures such as:

• Intellectual abilities
• Language skills
• Memory
• Problem solving
• Speed of information processing and task completion
• Concentration and attention
• Gross and fine motor skills
• Emotional functioning

The neuropsychologist will use your test results and medical records to create a comprehensive report, which likely will include treatment recommendations and referrals to specialists – physical or speech therapists or psychologists, for example — for treatment.

Some neuropsychologists provide treatment, which may include talk or another type of therapy, symptom management and emotional processing. Others adopt a team approach, with the neuropsychologist focusing on assessments and referring patients to other specialists for treatment.

This team approach has grown out of our ever-expanding knowledge of the brain and understanding of the brain-mind link.

Self-Help for Mental Health

Experts can help you manage your mental health symptoms to keep them from making your neurological condition worse. While you may need medicine or therapy to stay mentally healthy, you can also practice self-care with habits like these:

• Get adequate sleep. Sleep is one of the pillars of mental health, allowing your brain to process events, consolidate memories and regulate neurotransmitters. You can help yourself fall asleep by reducing exposure to blue-light emitting screens and turning off your phone before bedtime.
• Exercise daily. Even moderate exercise improves blood flow to the brain and releases feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and endorphins.
• Spend as much time as possible outdoors, even if it’s just taking a walk. Research shows 20 to 30 minutes spent in nature reduces the stress hormone cortisol.
• Practice mindfulness in any of its popular forms such as breathing, meditation or journaling. By quieting the mind, these practices can shrink the brain’s fight-or-flight center while thickening regions responsible for learning, memory and emotional regulation.
• Make lists – groceries needed, weekly goals, daily to-dos — then enjoy checking off completed items. Making a list reduces the stress of having to remember details, while crossing off items releases a burst of dopamine, one of the feel-good neurotransmitters.

This content is not AI generated.