Reading Our Minds

What, exactly, is psychiatry? How do psychiatrists diagnose a patient's mental disorders? The mental status exam is the bedrock of psychiatric clinical assessment, and it begins with, "Can you help me understand what's going on?" But the mental status exam relies on a patient's self-reporting and and a doctor's subjective judgment. What modern psychiatry needs is sensors, numbers, and algorithms. Our brain function, facial expression, sleep pattern, online behavior, and geolocation can tell us a lot, just as doctors use their automated sphygmomanometer to measure blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygenation level to successfully predict heart disease. Lab results, blood tests, and physical exam measures heralded the Big Data approach to medicine decades ago. It is time that psychiatry undergoes the same transformation Daniel Barron, who holds a PhD in Human Brain Imaging and completed his residency in Psychiatry at Yale, asks a provocative and important question: Is psychiatry scientific enough? At once pioneering and engaging, Reading Our Minds introduces readers to a series of digital tools that can help revolutionize psychiatry, and bring the practice firmly into the 21st-century and into the fold of modern medicine.