Wetenschappelijk tijdschrift voor psychiaters, artsen in opleiding tot psychiater en andere geïnteresseerden
Short report
Socio-biological psychiatry or: the interaction between brain and environment
- The animosity between biological and social views occasionally encountered in the day-to-day practice of psychiatry, lacks a rationale.
- This postulate, which is tenable also on theoretical grounds, is defended here with the aid of arguments derived from empirical research. They show that certain stimulus constellations in the environment can exert a profound influence on the 'state of the brain', and therefore also on individual behaviour patterns. Inversely, the 'state of the brain' influences our perception of and response to the environment.
- For this type of research into the interaction between brain and environment, the term socio-biological psychiatry is proposed.
- This type of research would seem to promise important consequences with regard to the treatment of psychiatric patients, as demonstrated with two examples.
- Views on the applicability of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy are currently antithetic. But even the still limited results so far supplied by sociobiological psychiatric research, disprove this.