For more than a century, a conceptual separation has been cultivated between body and mind, between physiology and psychology.
In academic settings and clinical practice, this split has become almost structural, even “job description–level”: “bodily” illnesses fall within the domain of medicine, while “mental–psychological” suffering belongs to psychology or psychiatry.
This division, likely inherited from Cartesian dualism and from a lack of systemic vision of life, has created a fragmented system in which the processes of the “fleshly” body and the mental processes are treated as independent entities, even though biological reality increasingly contradicts this view.
The discovery and study of regulatory T cells (Tregs)—for which the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was recently awarded—provide a striking example of how biology is beginning to repair this fracture.
Tregs are key cells in maintaining immune balance and preventing chronic inflammation. Recent research shows that deficits in these cells’ activity can contribute to affective disorders such as depression or anxiety, not through purely “psychological” mechanisms, but through physiological dysregulation that influences brain function, neurotransmitter production, and emotional reactivity.
Thus, depression and anxiety, across their full spectrum, can no longer be understood solely as states of the psyche; they must be seen as systemic phenomena, in which biology, psychology, and the environment interact continuously.
This integrative perspective challenges the old disciplinary separation and invites a redefinition of mental health—not as a “mind problem,” but as an expression of interdependent physiological and psychic networks.
Perhaps it is time to redefine the human being.
Perhaps it is time for each of us, through personal effort, curiosity, and openness to what new discoveries in neuroscience reveal, to dismantle the walls of paradigms erected between medicine and psychology.
Separation was once useful as a research method. But in the meantime, it has become toxic as an ideology.
It made us believe that depression and anxiety are only crises of the psyche, not of the body.
That affective suffering can be treated solely with words, adaptive and behavioral reconfigurations, ignoring the rest of the body, which suffers in silence.
In reality, the body is always speaking. Inflammation is its preferred language of expression.
Mental disorders can be expressions of deep physiological dysregulation—a body that has lost its ability to self-regulate—not just a “weak” or disturbed mind.
Recent biological data no longer leave room for this illusion: inflammation, immunity, stress, neuroplasticity, affective state, mental health—they are all facets of the same process.
We urgently need to recognize that psychology without physiology is metaphysics, and medicine without psychology is pure mechanics.
Tregs are not merely a medical discovery.
They are a sign—a biological reminder that psychic balance cannot exist without physiological balance, and that human healing requires a new, integrated approach.
I believe it is time to leave outdated theoretical and practical baggage in its well-deserved corner of history and move forward, guided by the scientific reality of the present—one that clearly shows that humans are, in fact, a unified whole: biological, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual!
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