Also not quite sure what the Wellcome Trust meant a few years ago when it acknowledged that a radical new approach is needed for mental health research (see previous post), as it now seems to be allocating funding again on the same basis by wasting it on 'pie in the sky’ fantasies about what's possible with mental health treatments. I'm not wanting to polarise debate unnecessarily in psychiatry, and advocate, like Nik Rose (see previous post), for critical friendship between social sciences and neuroscience. However, I think this does need an acknowledgement from neuroscience that too much neuroscience funding is being wasted on the unattainable.
I've been ruthless in my criticism of the conceptual foundations of the psychiatry of Carmine Pariante, the primary investigator of ASPIRE (see eg. previous post). I also did a cutting, satirical review of the book by Ed Bullmore (see previous post), that made the case, like ASPIRE, for anti-inflammatory medications being used as treatment for depression by targeting the right people on the basis of levels of inflammation. To me, it's nonsensical to talk about depression as an inflammatory disorder, like rheumatoid arthritis (see eg. another previous post). More fundamentally, looking for abnormalities of inflammation in the brains of depressed people is a conceptual category error (see eg. last post).
No comments:
Post a Comment