Neuroscience Education Making It Relevant to Psychiatric Training

Modern medicine is grounded in the scientific application of evidence-based treatments that target the pathophysiology of disease. Yet, in psychiatry we have struggled to move past a dualistic separation of mind from brain, and to embrace our identity as a clinical neuroscience discipline.1 As a product of this implicit dualism, our educational systems have treated neuroscience as, at most, a topic among many others given an hourly didactic slot for an academic quarter or so. To truly join our colleagues in modern medicine, we must integrate a neuroscience perspective into all aspects of psychiatric education and practice. However, barriers to the integration of neuroscience perspectives remain (Table 1). Much of clinical psychiatry today involves making evidence-based decisions based on clinical symptom checklists, all of which can be done without bringing attention to the underlying pathophysiology. In other medical fields, this type of practice is theoretically possible (eg, the prescription of antiarrhythmic agents for a particular cardiac syndrome without being able to consider the electrical circuitry of the heart), but would