ABSTRACT
This chapter examines ‘Neuroscience and Psychiatry’, starting with an anonymised clinical case history of bipolar affective disorder (previously known as manic depression) before providing an account of the current position of neuroscience in psychiatry. While acknowledging the limited contributions that neuroscience has made to certain areas within this field, this chapter outlines the failure of neuroscience to substantially increase our understanding of the causes of common mental illnesses (such as depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar affective disorder) or to substantially inform new therapies. The chapter provides suggestions for a more focused, realistic, proportionate approach to neuroscience in psychiatry, optimising the promise of studies of imaging, genetics, inflammation, and new treatments, while remaining aware of the cost and opportunity cost of much neuroscience over the past decades. This chapter concludes by outlining the need for a plurality of research methodologies in psychiatry - a true synthesis of techniques and understandings across neuroscience, medicine, law, history, spirituality, and other fields. Neuroscience needs to be contextualised as part of this broader search for knowledge and understanding, necessitating more radical, interdisciplinary approaches in the future, and wider, more inclusive frameworks for research and clinical care.
