Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience : A Primer

Advances in functional neuroimaging and cellular neuroscience offer hope of revolutionizing the approach to diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This book presents an introduction to network neuroscience and demonstrates the relationship of advances in this field to the future of psychiatry.

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.