Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry
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The author focuses on a new rapidly spreading practice of publication in open-access journals. The pros and cons of open-access journals are discussed. Publishing in these journals may be cost prohibitive for educators and junior faculty members. ⋯ The readership may be flooded with a large number of low-quality articles (maybe not even properly peer-reviewed) from open-access journals. It may take some time to sort out what is and what is not relevant and useful. Open-access publishing represents a problematic and controversial practice and may be associated with a conflict of interest for the editors and publishers of these journals.
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The National Institute of Mental Health seeks to address the gap between modern neuroscience and psychiatric training. The authors describe a two-pronged approach: first, to identify and support trainees in clinical neuroscience and second, to promote neuroscience literacy in psychiatric residency programs.
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Clinical and neurobiological data suggest that psychiatric disorders, as traditionally defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), are (1) more comorbid than expected by chance, (2) often share neurobiological signatures, and (3) reflect alterations across multiple brain systems that mediate particular mental processes. As such, emerging conceptualizations such at the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria Project (RDoC) have suggested that a different way to understand psychopathology may be with respect to the degree of dysfunction in each of these brain systems, seen dimensionally, which both cross traditional diagnostic boundaries and extend to a healthy range of functioning. At present, however, this scientific perspective has not been incorporated into neuroscience education in psychiatry, nor has its relationship to clinical care been made clear. ⋯ This "proof of concept" neuroscience course illustrates a potential route for bridging between rapid advances in psychiatric neuroscience and the clinical education for trainees not otherwise versed in neuroscience but who are needed for scientific advances to translate to the clinic. The promise of this approach may be in part related to the similarity between this framework and problem-based approaches common in routine clinical care. In such approaches, clinicians focus on the expressed complaints of their individual patient and identify specific symptoms as the target of treatment--symptoms which are presumably the expression of dysfunction in specific brain systems.