NPJ Digit Med
January 2023
Digital tools are transforming mental health care. The promise of this transformation to improve outcomes has not yet been realized fully. While some have become skeptical, this article argues that we are just at the end of Act 1, with several opportunities and challenges ahead.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article is a clinical guide which discusses the "state-of-the-art" usage of the classic monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) antidepressants (phenelzine, tranylcypromine, and isocarboxazid) in modern psychiatric practice. The guide is for all clinicians, including those who may not be experienced MAOI prescribers. It discusses indications, drug-drug interactions, side-effect management, and the safety of various augmentation strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile the COVID-19 pandemic has been a burden for our mental health, it also led to a surge in mental health care innovation. Appointments by telephone or video, as well as web- and app-based tools, have become part of a digital mental health revolution. Last year, US venture capitalists invested $5.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdverse posttraumatic neuropsychiatric sequelae (APNS) are common among civilian trauma survivors and military veterans. These APNS, as traditionally classified, include posttraumatic stress, postconcussion syndrome, depression, and regional or widespread pain. Traditional classifications have come to hamper scientific progress because they artificially fragment APNS into siloed, syndromic diagnoses unmoored to discrete components of brain functioning and studied in isolation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe digital revolution has reached the world of mental health. Prominent examples include the rapidly growing use of mobile health apps, the integration of sophisticated machine learning or artificial intelligence for clinical decision support and automated therapy, and the incorporation of virtual reality-based treatments. These diverse technologies hold the promise of addressing several important problems in mental health care, including lack of measurement, uneven access to clinicians, delay in receiving care, fragmentation of care, and negative attitudes toward psychiatry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDigital phenotyping uses smartphone and wearable signals to measure cognition, mood, and behavior. This promising new approach has been developed as an objective, passive assessment tool for the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Digital phenotyping is currently used with informed consent in research studies but is expected to expand to broader uses in healthcare and direct-to-consumer applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative is an ambitious project to develop innovative tools for a deeper understanding of how the brain functions in health and disease. Early programs in the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative focus on tools for next-generation imaging and recording, studies of cell diversity and cell census, and integrative approaches to circuit function. In all of these efforts, cell biologists can play a leading role.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Rev Dis Primers
November 2015
Schizophrenia is a chronic psychiatric disorder with a heterogeneous genetic and neurobiological background that influences early brain development, and is expressed as a combination of psychotic symptoms - such as hallucinations, delusions and disorganization - and motivational and cognitive dysfunctions. The mean lifetime prevalence of the disorder is just below 1%, but large regional differences in prevalence rates are evident owing to disparities in urbanicity and patterns of immigration. Although gross brain pathology is not a characteristic of schizophrenia, the disorder involves subtle pathological changes in specific neural cell populations and in cell-cell communication.
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