Editors’ Introduction to the Volume

Abstract

This year’s volume celebrates developments of recent years in our understanding of severe mental illness, in terms of how the brain works, at the biochemical, cellular and systemic levels. The contributors all have in common a concern for the molar, systemic implications of the more molecular processes at the core of their research. This concern reflects an important conceptual trend in our national mental health research agenda, toward identification of brain subsystems, neural circuits and information processing mechanisms whose dysfunction produces the cognitive and behavioral consequences that we recognize as the schizophrenia spectrum. Increasingly, psychopathologists expect that understanding these brain subsystems will revolutionize not just our diagnostic taxonomy, but also our basic understanding of the nature of severe mental illness.