Cognitive dissonance and mindset perturbations during crisis: "eco-socio-psycho-somatic" perspectives.

Mandatory and restrictive health regulations during the corona pandemic caused psychic disorders in many people, which even led to clinically relevant mental disorders. At the same time, there was gradually a polarization of opinions among the population. In order to improve future pandemic management, an integrative understanding of these psychosocial processes therefore seems useful.

Perspectives of (/memorandum for) systems thinking on COVID-19 pandemic and pathology.

Is data-driven analysis sufficient for understanding the COVID-19 pandemic and for justifying public health regulations? In this paper, we argue that such analysis is insufficient. Rather what is needed is the identification and implementation of over-arching hypothesis-related and/or theory-based rationales to conduct effective SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 (Corona) research. To that end, we analyse and compare several published recommendations for conceptual and methodological frameworks in medical research (e.

Toward a big picture of COVID-19.

The paper aims to illustrate and explain the problems and opportunities for improvement in Covid management that become evident when taking a systems perspective. Critical time delays occurred in the regulation of the pandemic that the management cycle of political cybernetics makes explicit. In general, the executive management of the pandemic in global, regional, and national organizations was unprepared in detecting and responding to the onset of the waves and making appropriate decisions towards differential instead of general lockdowns based on available data.

'Medical Corona Science': Philosophical and systemic issues: Re-thinking medicine? On the epistemology of Corona medicine.

Rationale, Aims, And Objectives: The disciplinary profile and the quality of production of knowledge on Corona pandemic is studied. This scientific field is called 'Medical Corona Science'.

Methods: Criteria of analytical philosophy of science and science studies are systematically applied.

Systems analysis shows that thermodynamic physiological and pharmacological fundamentals drive COVID-19 and response to treatment.

Why a systems analysis view of this pandemic? The current pandemic has inflicted almost unimaginable grief, sorrow, loss, and terror at a global scale. One of the great ironies with the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly early on, is counter intuitive. The speed at which specialized basic and clinical sciences described the details of the damage to humans in COVID-19 disease has been impressive.

How does the 'environment' come to the person? The 'ecology of the person' and addiction.

Currently, psychiatry lacks a field that can be called "theoretical psychiatry", which uses theoretical concepts and explanatory models: The main stream of research is to collect data of all kinds in the hope that the computational Big Data approach will shed a bright light on the black box of mental disorders. Accordingly, the biology-based Research Domain Criteria of the National Institute of Mental Health have been established. However, as philosophical analyses of concepts and methods have shown, several epistemological gaps stand in the way of a consistent multilevel understanding of mental disorders.

The Quest for System-Theoretical Medicine in the COVID-19 Era.

Precision medicine and molecular systems medicine (MSM) are highly utilized and successful approaches to improve understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of many diseases from bench-to-bedside. Especially in the COVID-19 pandemic, molecular techniques and biotechnological innovation have proven to be of utmost importance for rapid developments in disease diagnostics and treatment, including DNA and RNA sequencing technology, treatment with drugs and natural products and vaccine development. The COVID-19 crisis, however, has also demonstrated the need for systemic thinking and transdisciplinarity and the limits of MSM: the neglect of the bio-psycho-social systemic nature of humans and their context as the object of individual therapeutic and population-oriented interventions.

The Human Ecological Perspective and Biopsychosocial Medicine.

With regard to philosophical anthropology, a human ecological framework for the human-environment relationship as an "ecology of the person" is outlined, which focuses on the term "relationship" and aims to be scientifically sound. It also provides theoretical orientations for multiprofessional clinical work. For this purpose, a multi-dimensional basic grid for the characterization of the individual human being is proposed.

Medical knowledge integration and "systems medicine": Needs, ambitions, limitations and options.

Medicine today is an extremely heterogeneous field of knowledge, based on clinical observations and action knowledge and on data from the biological, behavioral and social sciences. We hypothesize at first that medicine suffers from a disciplinary hyper-diversity compared to the level of conceptual interdisciplinary integration. With the claim to "understand" and cure diseases, currently with the label "Systems Medicine" new forms of molecular medicine promise a general new bottom-up directed precise, personalized, predictive, preventive, translational, participatory, etc.

From mind to molecules and back to mind-Metatheoretical limits and options for systems neuropsychiatry.

like dementia are increasingly relevant for public health affairs. promises progress in diagnosis and treatment of these illnesses and exhibits a rapid increase of knowledge by new neurotechnologies. In order to find generic patterns in huge neurobiological data sets and by exploring formal brain models, offers many examples of fruitful insights into the complex dynamics of neuronal information processing.

Steps Toward an Integrative Clinical Systems Psychology.

Clinical fields of the "sciences of the mind" (psychotherapy, psychiatry, etc.) lack integrative conceptual frameworks that have explanatory power. Mainly descriptive-classificatory taxonomies like DSM dominate the field.

Methodological Problems on the Way to Integrative Human Neuroscience.

Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary effort to understand the structures and functions of the brain and brain-mind relations. This effort results in an increasing amount of data, generated by sophisticated technologies. However, these data enhance our , rather than improve our of brain functions.

[Pain and opioid dependency as multilevel network phenomenon : Theoretical and metatheoretical aspects].

Methodological reflections on pain research and pain therapy focussing on addiction risks are addressed in this article. Starting from the incompleteness of objectification of the purely subjectively fully understandable phenomena of pain and addiction, the relevance of a comprehensive general psychology is underlined. It is shown that that reduction of pain and addiction to a mainly focally arguing neurobiology is only possible if both disciplines have a systemic concept of pain and addiction.

A heuristic model for working memory deficit in schizophrenia.

Background: The life of schizophrenia patients is severely affected by deficits in working memory. In various brain regions, the reciprocal interactions between excitatory glutamatergic neurons and inhibitory GABAergic neurons are crucial. Other neurotransmitters, in particular dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine, modulate the local balance between glutamate and GABA and therefore regulate the function of brain regions.

A heuristic model of alcohol dependence.

Background: Substance dependence poses a critical health problem. Sadly, its neurobiological mechanisms are still unclear, and this lack of real understanding is reflected in insufficient treatment options. It has been hypothesized that alcohol effects are due to an imbalance between neuroexcitatory and neuroinhibitory amino acids.

The neurochemical mobile with non-linear interaction matrix: an exploratory computational model.

Several years ago, the "neurochemical mobile" was introduced as a visual tool for explaining the different balances between neurotransmitters in the brain and their role in mental disorders. Here we complement this concept with a non-linear computational systems model representing the direct and indirect interactions between neurotransmitters, as they have been described in the "neurochemical interaction matrix." The model is constructed within the framework of biochemical systems theory, which facilitates the mapping of numerically ill-characterized systems into a mathematical and computational construct that permits a variety of analyses.

Computational modelling of schizophrenic symptoms: basic issues.

Emerging "(computational) systems medicine" challenges neuropsychiatry regarding the development of heuristic computational brain models which help to explore symptoms and syndromes of mental disorders. This methodology of exploratory modelling of mental functions and processes and of their pathology requires a clear and operational definition of the target variable (explanandum). In the case of schizophrenia, a complex and heterogeneous disorder, single psychopathological key symptoms such as working memory deficiency, hallucination or delusion need to be defined first.

Systems biology in psychiatric research: from complex data sets over wiring diagrams to computer simulations.

The classification of psychiatric disorders has always been a problem in clinical settings. The present debate about the major systems in clinical practice, DSM-IV and ICD-10, has resulted in attempts to improve and replace those schemes by some that include more endophenotypic and molecular features. However, these disorders not only require more precise diagnostic tools, but also have to be viewed more extensively in their dynamic behaviors, which require more precise data sets related to their origins and developments.

Effects of dopamine and glutamate on synaptic plasticity: a computational modeling approach for drug abuse as comorbidity in mood disorders.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) affects about 16% of the general population and is a leading cause of death in the United States and around the world. Aggravating the situation is the fact that "drug use disorders" are highly comorbid in MDD patients, and VICE VERSA. Drug use and MDD share a common component, the dopamine system, which is critical in many motivation and reward processes, as well as in the regulation of stress responses in MDD.

Affective disorders as complex dynamic diseases--a perspective from systems biology.

Understanding mental disorders and their neurobiological basis encompasses the conceptual management of "complexity" and "dynamics". For example, affective disorders exhibit several fluctuating state variables on psychological and biological levels and data collected of these systems levels suggest quasi-chaotic periodicity leading to use concepts and tools of the mathematics of nonlinear dynamic systems. Regarding this, we demonstrate that the concept of "Dynamic Diseases" could be a fruitful way for theory and empirical research in neuropsychiatry.

Mental illness, synapses and the brain--behavioral disorders by a system of molecules within a system of neurons?

The multi-level systems view conceiving the brain as a "network of networks of neurons" rises the question how it could be possible to understand this complex system with respect to mental functions and dysfunctions. One crucial issue is related to the analysis of the connectivity of these networks by the study of synapses. Also synapses are complex dynamical molecular systems that can only be understood by computer-based methodologies in order to analyze complex data sets and for modeling complex molecular networks.