Our understanding of mental illness—and wellness, for that matter—is still in its infancy, even after more than a century of inquiry. Why is that? Partly because understanding the brain has required advanced technology and computational tools, which are only now becoming widely available, from neuroimaging to network theory, and more recently, artificial intelligence and machine learning (Friston, 2011; Bassett & Sporns, 2017). Equally, our grasp of the complex body-mind, psychological, interpersonal, and cultural-sociological factors has been limited by similar constraints.

Humans-in-the-world represent an unfathomably complex “problem” to “solve for,” so despite our impressive efforts, we’ve often been searching in the dark. Given our relatively simple bihemispheric brain and still-evolving tools, it’s remarkable we’ve come as far as we have.

Until recently, treatments for mental illness have focused on psychotherapy, medication, and lifestyle modifications. Human problems in living go well beyond mental illness or the pursuit of wellness; we are always developing, from cradle to grave. Erik Erikson’s model of human development (Erikson, 1950) highlighted the importance of navigating life-stage dilemmas—such as “Ego Integrity vs. Despair," as the final curtainfall approaches.

The developmental approach is a broad and enduring framework. Psychotherapy—particularly open-ended psychodynamic and psychoanalytic approaches—maximizes the space for individuals to explore, find themselves, address relationship problems, seek fulfillment, and reduce suffering (Shedler, 2010). Structured therapies leverage specific strategies and are more "goal-directed," but overall, the evidence for talk therapies is often stronger than for medication alone. Psychodynamic approaches may have more enduring benefit, continuing beyond the termination of therapy as the therapeutic experience and relationship becomes more deeply ingrained, or "internalized," as a result of depth and duration (Neuropsychoanalysis Association, 2025).

Over time, medications can be stabilizing and may potentiate growth, but with some exceptions—such as psychedelics, which may increase neuroplasticity (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019)—medications alone do not necessarily facilitate human development.

Combined approaches are generally more effective than any alone (Cuijpers et al., 2020; Kochanowski et al., 2024), but how to combine them, and for whom; and moreover how to sequence approaches together over developmental time...we simply don't know, and we don't have a way to put it all together. Yet.

Enter neuromodulation-based therapeutics—most notably, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS or rTMS1). Other interventions include deep brain stimulators (DBS), vagal nerve stimulators (VNS), neurophotobiomodulation, focused ultrasound (FUS), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and cranial electrical stimulation (CES) (George & Aston-Jones, 2010; Lefaucheur et al., 2020). These approaches hinge on decoding brain function, focusing on regions, circuits, and, increasingly, networks.

TMS may ultimately surpass psychedelics as our understanding of brain networks (e.g. Fox et al., 2014; Menon, 2024) and targeting advances (e.g. Lioumis et al., 2025). Rather than targeting a single region, an integrated understanding of an individual’s brain network function will likely enable network-individualized treatment protocols.

In essence, we might perform noninvasive “network surgery” to correct dysfunction, shifting the brain from dysconnectivity to “euconnectivity”2. This opens the door to a network-based diagnostic model: In the future, instead of diagnosing patients with MDD, GAD, or ADHD, we might identify and treat, to be fanciful, “Type 3a Network Dysfunction” or similar, focusing on the underlying networks, based on a causality-based diagnostic system yet to be developed3. Such models would leverage advances in neuroimaging and computational

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