Wednesday, May 4, 2022

  • 05/04/2022 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
    In the US, 60% of adolescents and young adults with major depressive disorders reported receiving no treatment in the previous year. The same for 45% of adults with serious mental disorders in Canada, the US, Chile, Germany and the Netherlands. Mental health care systems do not have the capacity to address public mental health treatment needs. The first line of treatment for many or most patients with ADHD, anxiety or depression is pharmacotherapy provided by primary care physicians, yet the efficacy of these treatments has been shown to be limited in multiple meta-analyses. The former Director of the NIMH stated “There are very few new molecular entities, very few novel ideas, and almost nothing that gives any hope for a transformation in the treatment of mental illness.” Of candidate new CNS drugs, each developed at cost of >$500M, 93% fail clinical trials. Digital Neurotherapies (DNT), technology-enabled neuroscience, offer a highly promising new approach to these problems. Our brains support cognition, emotion and behavior through the action of dynamically reconfiguring functional systems that integrate action of millions of neurons anatomically distributed across many brain regions. Psychiatric symptoms and illness result when these systems are disrupted. DNT repairs neurosystem function using the same sensory input and neuroplastic process responsible for the original post-natal shaping of the systems by environmental input. It produces targeted activity-dependent enhancement of system function with few of no side-effects. Studies have shown it to be highly effective as a supplement or alternative to medications.