You are raising a very good and very important issue right now in terms of prevention. The issue with mental illness, as you know, is that all our diagnoses to date are symptom-based. How do you feel? You express your symptoms. You may or you may not express all your symptoms to the clinician, and/or the clinician may have subjective bias in terms of interpreting the symptoms you're describing.
What we need to do is just as you explained in the case of your blood pressure and your pulse being indicators. We need to have some biomarkers that are pulsing the status of your mental health. We do not have those as yet. The reason we have those for other illnesses is that we've spent a lot of time and effort focusing on those. Once you have those, once you can measure your cholesterol level, you know what to do about it. You go into a gym, or you might try statins or whatever to reduce your cholesterol level, to take care of your health.
In mental health we don't have that. We need tools, biological tools, to be able to measure your mental status and not rely strictly on the symptoms. For example, if you look at PTSD, right now there is a lot of evidence suggesting that if you use certain markers and do brain scans, the brain actually lights up very differently, almost like a Christmas tree, in terms of certain ligands.
So we have the beginnings of understanding. Can we develop those markers as full-fledged markers that will really predict what's going on? Once you know that, you can get going to the prevention strategies much better, because you will know what you want to prevent and how you want to mitigate that risk. This is something we need to spend much more time on than we are right now.