NeuroAnalysis: The Copernican Revolution for Psychiatry

To make the NeuroAnalysis revolution actually happen, CBP must achieve reliability and validity. The DSM system has reached reliability by consensus agreement between psychiatrists with a common, agreed-upon descriptive text.

The CBP format is based on the same phenomenological patters of mental disorders and has been shown to be reliable.¹ It can become even more reliable once adopted by the official psychiatric bodies, such as the National Institute of Mental Health.

Validity is another story. It is the final transformative groundbreaking step of our profession, and it will need to overcome the challenge of extracting the subtle plasticity and connectivity alterations of mental disorders from “noisy” brains in the face of weak signal processing algorithms. This requires better objective extraction of phenomenology using currently developed deployed-sensors technology (such as smartphones and wearable devices, e.g. Google Glass).

NeuroAnalysis can become further validated when joined accumulation of  the“phenomenology-to-brain junction,” especially with large amounts of data and data-mining available thanks to large projects such as the BRAIN initiative.

To summarize, NeuroAnalysis with CBP is an alternative neuro-scientific diagnostic approach to mental disorders. In contrast to the DSM which is a descriptive diagnosis that focuses on signs and symptoms, CBP seeks to transpose descriptive phenomenology into neuro-scientific conceptualization. 

Abraham Peled, MD, is a psychiatrist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel and chair of the adult psychiatric department at Shaar Menashe Mental Health Center in Ezor Hadera. He is the author of the book NeuroAnalysis: Bridging the Gap between Neuroscience, Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry.

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