The past quarter of a century has witnessed numerous advances in neuroscience, such as neuroimaging and non-invasive electrical brain stimulation in humans, and optogenetics in animals (the highly selective activation of neurons using laser light, see Fennon et al., 2011).

If we believe that 'minds are what brains do' (Minsky, 1988), we might expect this to lead to improved treatment of mental health problems.

et arguably, the only appreciable impact of neuroscience research on routing mental health practice has been in the use of animal models to develop new drugs, which has yielded few new treatments in this field over the past decade.

This disconnect between modern neuroscience research and mental health practice partly reflects the unresolved 'hard' problem of consciousness: How does the brain generate consciousness?

Mapping between activity in neurons or circuits and subjective experience remains a huge conceptual, indeed philosophical, challenge.

"Good science (including clinical science) requires reliable measurement, and neuroscience deals with what can be measured objectively at the level of the brain.

In animals, neuroscience measurements and manipulations can be causally related to behaviour, but experience can only be inferred indirectly; human studies have attempted to link brain function to subjective experience measured using self-report, but for ethical reasons these studies are largely correlational.

More broadly, we lack a generally accepted neuroscientific explanation of how brains make minds (though there have been some attempts, e.g. Craig, 2009).

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~ "What Has Neuroscience Ever Done for Us?" Jonathan Roiser (winner of the British Psychological Society's Spearman Medal 2013) considers the case of mental health. From Brain in the News, Vol. 22 No. 4 - April 2015, The Dana Foundation.