Psychiatry as clinical neuroscience – can it help us?

Prof. Dr. Andreas Reif,  Director of the Clinic for Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy
on November 9,  2015

Over the last one hundred and fifty years, psychiatry has evolved from a rather descriptive discipline, whose therapeutic options have been benevolent but predominantly frustrating, to a highly therapeutic discipline. Despite the impressive successes of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic therapies in the last 50 years, convincing pathophysiological models are still lacking and, accordingly, diagnostics in this subject is still largely descriptive and not much different from around 1900. The entry of neuroscience into psychiatry, however, opens up the possibility of making psychiatry a diagnostic-therapeutic subject as well.
On the basis of some exemplary examples from the fields of genetics, neuroimaging, etc., current developments were outlined in this lecture, thus giving an outlook on the subject of psychiatry as a clinical neuroscience.