Bruce Cuthbert on Enabling Technologies (TIPS 2018)

This keynote address, Enabling Technologies: Toward Bridges Across Translational Gaps in Psychiatry, was part of the 2018 Technology in Psychiatry Summit, an event sponsored by the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry, which occurred November 1-2, 2018 at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.

While psychiatry has lagged behind other areas of medicine in precision medicine approaches to diagnosis and treatment, recent developments augur accelerating progress. Digital technologies represent one such area, enabling measurement of myriad aspects of behavior and providing thousands of innovative new apps for treatment. New frameworks for research, as exemplified by the NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project, have contributed to new ideas about conceptualizing, diagnosing, and treating mental disorders. This presentation reviews ways in which these and other new trends intersect, and outlines the potential for novel ways of addressing longstanding issues in mental health research, such as mind-body and categorical-dimensional distinctions, translation of animal research to psychopathology, and new opportunities for prevention research.

Bruce Cuthbert, PhD, is the director of the NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) unit to develop neuroscience-based criteria for studying mental disorders. He previously served as the director of the Division of Adult Translational Research and Treatment Development and as the chief of the Adult Psychopathology Research Branch at NIMH. He is known for his research on the psychophysiology of emotion and translational research on the psychopathology of anxiety disorders. He was elected president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research in 2004, and is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Please visit mclean.org/itp to learn more about the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry.