Promoting Psychiatry Research Posted on October 19, 2007 Harold Pincus (bio) reflects on the opportunities he has had to bring research and practice together.

Well, there are a lot of barriers at multiple levels. Probably the biggest barrier was within psychiatry itself. That, I think in many ways, people in medical school that chose to go into psychiatry were less interested in research, and people that were interested in research were less interested in psychiatry. So there was a - not that big an intersection of those two pools. And so that's partly a problem, and partly it was the image of psychiatry as being a less evidence-based specialty. Partly, there was also the image of the research within mental health as being softer, somehow less directly related to medicine and medical care. And I think for some time, that perception might have been accurate, but the reality was changing much more quickly than the perception of that reality. And so part of it was promoting a greater awareness of what is really involved in psychiatric research; making people realize that the organ of interest for psychiatry and mental illness is the brain, and unlocking the mysteries of the brain, opening windows to understand it was a tremendous opportunity; both mystifying, but at the same time potentially answerable questions could be posed given the new technologies that were available. And also to make people aware that these are real serious illnesses and by illnesses, I mean real illnesses. They're not sort of figments of people's imagination. And so that's part of it also; that fundamentally there's nothing that really distinguishes what's a mental disorder from what's a "physical disorder," because there's much that's physical in the mental, and as much that's mental in the physical.

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