The Vermont Recovery page has some interesting articles. This one on Neuroplasticity is quite good. It is a downloadable PDF document.
"Neuroplasticity basically refers to the brain’s natural ability across the lifespan to form
new connections and change its structure in response to experience. This means the brain can
change itself physically and functionally at any age to compensate for injury and disease and to
adapt to new situations or changes in the environment."
"Traditionally, the adult brain was considered relatively hard-wired and fixed, a prognosis
that lowered expectations about the possibility of curing the alleged brain problems that
underlie psychiatric disorders. Thus, in the medical world, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder
have been conceptualized as life-long, incurable brain pathologies that a person can learn to
manage, but never completely resolve. However, these hypotheses have always been
problematic, for longitudinal studies have demonstrated again and again that a significant
amount of people diagnosed with schizophrenia completely emerge from psychiatric symptoms
and no longer use medications.
4
These individuals pose this challenge to neurobiology: if their
previous symptoms were in fact due to a broken brain, are their brains now fixed?"
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