Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience ─ A Primer

Research in neuroscience is revolutionizing how we think about psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Psychiatric disorders reflect dysfunction of the human mind and involve changes in cognition, emotion, and motivation. Understanding how the neural networks that underlie these mental functions become dysfunctional holds great promise for devising innovative approaches to diagnosis and treatment. Scientific progress is being driven, in part, by advances in human functional neuroimaging, which is being used to characterize the activity of specific brain circuits at rest and during the performance of specific tasks. Moreover, advances in clinical neuroscience are being coupled with expanding knowledge about genetics and cellular and synaptic neuroscience. Taken together, these advancements offer the hope of much more mechanism-based approaches to treatment in the future. Better understanding of neural circuits also can provide the basis for innovative psychotherapeutic strategies that take advantage of brain plasticity for purposes of neurorehabilitation. In this book, we examine recent developments in the field of network neuroscience and their potential impact on clinical psychiatry, including the way that psychiatrists are trained and interact with other medical specialties and mental health professionals.

Dr. Zorumski is the Samuel B. Guze Professor and Head of the Department of Psychiatry and Professor of Neurobiology at Washington University in St. Louis - School of Medicine, where he is also Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Director of the McDonnell Center for Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology. His research focuses on synaptic transmission in the hippocampus, and on the use of brain stimulation methods to treat psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Rubin is Vice-Chair for Education and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis - School of Medicine. He is also Professor of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include Alzheimer's disease and depression in the presence of comorbid medical illness. He directed the psychiatry residency training program at Washington University School of Medicine for 20 years.