A major challenge to finding treatments for mental illness is the design of a valid animal model.

The problem is that no one knows whether other mammals suffer mental illness like humans.

A study investigated whether mental illness genes are the evolutionary cost of having big brains.

No significant increase in the relative occurrence of risk genes for mental illness was found in humans.

Mental health disorders are common. In America, about fifty percent of us will suffer from a mental health disorder in our lifetime. Unfortunately, efficacious treatments have been difficult to develop. One of the reasons that the development of therapies has been so difficult is that science lacks valid or reliable animal models of these mental diseases. The effectiveness of our therapies is often determined by the validity of our animal models. Finding treatments is more difficult because the human brain is incredibly complex and our understandings still incomplete. Another major issue is in identifying animal behaviors that correspond to “mental illness” behaviors seen in humans. For example, how does a mouse express anxiety? Do they even experience anxiety? Shouldn’t these psychiatric symptoms have placed the suffering individuals at an evolutionary disadvantage? Neuroscientists assume that brains work the same across all animals and that their dysfunctions are like ours.

A recent study investigated two common forms of mental illness in humans. Schizophrenia, characterized by delusions and hallucinations as well as impaired communication and social function, has a lifetime prevalence of roughly 0.5%. Autism shows characteristics like........

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