Amit Etkin

More and more, I see over-generalization as a new and important domain for understanding anxiety, which may furthermore offer us new and different insights into how we might better treat these patients.

The neat part about it … is the data are out there, it’s just about asking the questions, not coming up with a fancy new tool, simply asking the question, and when you do, very interesting, surprising things come up.

As a clinician and neuroscientist, I would argue it validates a sense a lot of clinicians implicitly have, but our diagnosis system discourages— that there are a lot of similarities between the way patients with different disorders process information, [The findings] allow us to think a little bit more flexibly about our patients and focus on things that don’t fit into [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)] categories.

If we get out of our box of thinking depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder are things that have one set of treatments and start to look at the boxes nearby and draw on tools from those other boxes, that can’t hurt our patient, [It can] only help our ability to treat clinically but also from the research side, [entice] us to think differently about what kind of circuitry to try to intervene with to help people.

The most critical element, we just don’t have a hammer, we design a hammer to hit the nail. In this case, the nail never actually had a proper hammer to be targeted with.

That concept of schizophrenia has been around for a while and linked to this kind of system, but people never really stepped back look at the forest for the trees and asked whether the same kind of process is in place across psychiatric disorders.

The only information we use for diagnosis is what [the patient] reports; in other words, their symptoms and the way we observe them, sitting in front of them.

But once you get to the level of the brain, you have to check and in fact question assumptions because they might mislead you.

As disorders become more chronic and longstanding, there’s more loss in this circuit, but the function of these regions is also affected by things that put you at risk for psychiatric disorders. Certain genes, early life trauma, these things put one at risk for a range of disorders but also seem to affect function.