60th Annual Meeting

October 19 - 27, 2013

Other Programs (open)

Lawrence A. Stone, M.D., Plenary: From Psychiatry to Clinical Neuroscience

Psychiatry is a discipline in transition. The recent revolution in tools for gene sequencing and brain imaging confers new opportunities for defining the biology of mental disorders. As we begin to understand mental disorders as neurodevelopmental disorders, diagnosis and therapeutics will increasingly involve genetics, neuroscience, and cognitive science. This transition promises much better outcomes for our patients but to realize this clinical benefit, we will need much different training for our residents. This presentation describes some of the opportunities and challenges if psychiatry is to become clinical neuroscience.

Thomas R. Insel, M.D. is Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) charged with generating the knowledge needed to understand, treat, and prevent mental disorders. Over the past decade, his tenure at NIMH, the world’s largest funder of research on mental disorders, has supported large-scale practical trials, increased its focus on autism, and put highest priority on applying new insights from genetics and neuroscience to understanding mental disorders. Dr. Insel also served as Acting Director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), from December 2011 to September 2012.