Neuropsychiatry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Neuropsychiatry is the branch of medicine dealing with mental disorders attributable to diseases of the nervous system. Considered a subspecialty of psychiatry, it is also closely related to the field of Behavioral Neurology, which is a subspecialty of Neurology that addresses clinical problems of cognition and/or behavior caused by brain injury or brain disease. Indeed, Behavioral Neurology / Neuropsychiatry is recognized as a single subspecialty by the United Council for Neurologic Subspecialties (UCNS).
Another closely related discipline is neuropsychology - with its roots in neurology and psychology. It focuses more on psychological testing procedures, and is practised by clinical psychologists who have further training in neuropsychology.
Nowadays, these three related disciplines play important interactive and somewhat different roles in brain-behavior studies. Where an individual scientist falls on this spectrum is often an accident of training rather than a result of knowledge, skills, or interest.
[edit] History
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Historically, all neurologists were fully trained in psychiatry, and all psychiatrists were also neurologists (see Freud, who originally was a child neurologist, and Charcot). These were the classic "neuropsychiatrists".
For reasons perhaps more related to academic politics than to science, the two disciplines split into "neurology" and "psychiatry", as if one could understand (and diagnose and treat) the brain and the emotional mind independently.
Recent scientific advances - e.g., the possibility to "visualize" if ever so primitively certain emotional processes as they are taking place in the brain - as well as the realization that this hyperspecialization may be harmful to patients suffering from complex mind-brain disorders (e.g., epilepsy, chronic pain), may have contributed to a certain rapprochement.
A small, but now again increasing number of physicians are both fully trained neurologists and psychiatrists, and arguably most qualified to diagnose and treat patients suffering from these "overlap" disorders: Epilepsy with co-morbid mood disorders, the differential diagnosis of non-epileptic seizures, Parkinson disease with depression or dementia, psychosomatic disorders, chronic pain, and others.
[edit] See also
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Neuroscience subfields: |
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| Neurobiology | Cognitive Neuroscience | Computational Neuroscience | Neural Engineering | Neuroanatomy | Neurochemistry | Neuroendocrinology |Neuroimaging | Neurolinguistics | Neurology | Neuromonitoring | Neuropharmacology | Neurophysiology | Neuropsychology | Neuropsychiatry | Psychopharmacology | Systems Neuroscience | Molecular Cellular Cognition | |
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Psychology subfields: |
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| Cognitive Psychology | Cognitive Neuroscience | Computational Psychology | Biological Psychology | Mathematical Psychology | Neuroimaging | Psycholinguistics | Psychophysics | Psychophysiology | Neuropsychology | Neuropsychiatry | Psychopharmacology | Systems Neuroscience | Developmental Psychology | Social Psychology | Clinical Psychology | Evolutionary Psychology |
[edit] External links
- Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment
- The British Neuropsychiatry Association
- Royal College of Psychiatrists, Special Interest Group in Neuropsychiatry (SIGN)
- American Neuropsychiatric Association
- International Neuropsychiatric Association
- Royal Melbourne Hospital Neuropsychiatry Unit
- Society for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology
