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Today's post is by Derek Bolton . He is Professor of Philosophy and Psychopathology at King’s College London. His latest book co-authored with Grant Gillett  is The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease: Philosophical and Scientific Developments  (Springer Palgrave, 2019, Open Access). Imagine how odd this would be: You or the family were attending clinic (say neurology, orthopedic, pediatric or psychiatric), enquired about causes and cures, and the reply referred to complexity and the Biopsychosocial Model. You go home and look this up, and happen upon criticism by many authoritative commentators to the effect that the Biopsychosocial Model, popular though it is, is scientifically, clinically, and philosophically useless. This is actually where we are and this is the problem we diagnose and address in our book. We propose a formulation of the problem along the following lines: The 1960s and ‘70s saw the beginnings of systems theory approaches in biology, in principle ...

The Royal College of Psychiatrists hosted its  Faculty of Neuropsychiatry Annual Conference on 13-14 September 2018 in London. I was fortunate to attend the first day and I am going to report on some of the interesting talks I listened to. In the first session speakers focused on neuroscience for psychiatrists, and Paul Johns, author of Clinical Neuroscience , addressed the functional anatomy of the human amygdala. The amygdala is constantly looking out for dangers and helps us evaluate the emotional significance of events. It facilitates social interactions as it enables us to read other people's minds. Further, the amygdala is involved in learning and episodic memory for important events. It is responsible for an implicit emotional memory of negative events to help us avoid adverse stimuli. The amygdala is for assessing environmental cues to determine the adequate response to threats. So patients without the amygdala are fearless but it is possible to experimentally induce a pan...