Filtering the noise: a cerebellar-centered framework for understanding and treating mental illness -a paradigm shift in psychiatry

For the past half-century, psychiatric drug development has largely focused on tweaking neurotransmitter receptors and chemical pathways. Yet despite billions of dollars invested and major advances in neuroscience, truly innovative treatments for mental illness remain scarce. Disorders like depression, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) continue to be managed with drugs discovered decades ago that often provide only partial relief, with remission rates of approximately 30-40% for treatment-resistant depression and 60-70% of schizophrenia patients experiencing persistent symptoms despite medication. This stagnation has prompted a paradigm shift - what if the key to treating mental illness is not just which receptor a drug targets, but how it changes the brain’s processing of sensory information? In this treatise, I propose that many psychiatric conditions stem from breakdowns in the brain’s sensory filtering mechanisms, the neural circuits that gate irrelevant stimuli before they consume valuable processing resources, and that effective therapies must restore these filtering functions. While computational psychiatry has long recognized that mental illness may r