social sciences approaches<\/em>.<\/div>\nBack in those salad days, I was peripherally involved with a workgroup focusing on the problem of rejection in those early days of organ transplantation. "Matching" was embryonal and the drugs for immunosupression were plenty toxic. We were looking at another angle – how to kill off the T-Cells that mediated tissue rejection. A decade or so later, we all found out what happened when you kill off T-Cells. It’s called AIDS, and it’s not a very good idea. But back then, it was indeed the holy grail – leading edge stuff, novel, innovative.<\/p>\n
It’s translational neuroscience<\/em> that gets to me the most. Literally it means focusing on research that can be translated<\/em> into clinical use. Keep the eggheads from following their idiosyncratic interests and get them working on things we need. It’s an NIH buzz word picked up by the NIMH’s Tom Insel and the Lieberman\/APA set. If you want an NIMH grant these days, you write it up being sure to include how it can be translated quickly into leading edge, novel, innovative treatments. It’s based on the unlikely notion that if you tell scientists what you want, they’ll get right on it and find it. What it can lead to is scientists and researchers thinking about how to get grants rather than following whatever muse leads to real advances. It only makes sense when there’s a clear direction to follow. I wish someone would tally up the results of all those translational grants and funded translational centers to see their track record. <\/p>\nAnd comparative effectiveness studies<\/em> sound a lot like clinical trials to me. In psychiatry, we’ve had almost nothing but clinical trials since we went scientific in 1980. Clinical Trials aren’t exactly research. They’re what comes at the end, not where you start. As we all know, clinical trials became one of the conduits for a mammoth pharmaceutical scam escalating for decades in psychiatry – built on the kind of talk we’re hearing from this APA president. And in my reading, this whole article is directed towards focusing what the government does on maintaining the current research programs of Medical School Departments of Psychiatry in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed. <\/p>\n"
I seriously doubt that a daylong government call to arms on other public health problems such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, or infectious disease would have devoted so little time to talking about medical approaches and their scientific underpinnings,<\/em>" says Dr. Lieberman. Given the amount of time psychiatry has spent rattling on with its current buzz talk about "biomedical or neuroscience perspectives<\/em>," I think we’re more that a day behind on the other things. It’s time to catch up and return some balance to the specialty. The false dichotomy Dr. Lieberman is promoting here may well have been appropriate thirty three years ago to correct a genuine imbalance in the force, but that time has long passed. And phrases like "accurate medical diagnosis and gold-standard treatment<\/em>" in the months after the DSM-5 debacle in an era of huge pharmaceutical settlements just make him sound silly and uninformed… <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Will the Government Do the Right Thing? From the President Psychiatric News by Jeffrey Lieberman June 25, 2013 …there were things about it that gave me pause. The tenor and content of the meeting were not as medically oriented or scientifically based as I would have liked. The presentations and discussions got a little too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38962"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42016,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38962\/revisions\/42016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"http:\/\/psychnews.psychiatryonline.org\/data\/Journals\/PN\/927185\/jeffrey_lieberman.png\")
…there were things about it that gave me pause. The tenor and content of the meeting were not as medically oriented or scientifically based as I would have liked. The presentations and discussions got a little too “touchy feely” at times, and the overall focus seemed more on social-science approaches to mental health care than biomedical or neuroscience perspectives. This is not to say that recovery, peer support, counseling, and stigma are not vitally important issues for the enhancement of mental health care quality and access. But health care begins with accurate medical diagnosis and gold-standard treatment — and the whole point of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act is to make sure that patients get both medical treatment and supportive services from professionals and peers. I seriously doubt that a daylong government call to arms on other public health problems such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, or infectious disease would have devoted so little time to talking about medical approaches and their scientific underpinnings. I would have liked to hear more about collaborative care models, early detection and intervention strategies, methods of treating medical and substance use comorbidity in people with mental disorders, and the need for more research ranging from translational neuroscience to comparative effectiveness studies…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n