Sounding like something straight out of science fiction, DARPA recently announced grants to fund research and development of implantable brain-stimulation chips aimed to relieve, or even cure, mental disorders. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency thinks big, and it has the money, i.e., our tax dollars, to back it up. Decades ago, DARPA brought us […]
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A few years ago I wrote that uncertainty is inevitable in psychiatry. We literally don’t know the pathogenesis of any psychiatric disorder. Historically, when the etiology of abnormal behavior became known, the disease was no longer considered psychiatric. Thus, neurosyphilis and myxedema went to internal medicine; seizures, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and many other formerly psychiatric […] This third installment in my series on sloppy thinking in psychiatry addresses something a little more subtle than “chemical imbalance” or polypharmacy. It is the growing vision, well represented by this recent editorial in Current Psychiatry, that the only salvation for the field lies in embracing the language and practice of neuroscience. With “chemical imbalance” […] |
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