Dear Colleagues

We are very pleased to welcome you all to the first special issue of European Psychiatry. This is a new initiative aiming to offer to our readership considerable amount of information on important and topical issues in all aspects of Psychiatry.

We hope we can count on the readership and psychiatric community as a whole for ideas and suggestions of topics to be covered.

Neuroimaging is perhaps the most exciting recent technological development in psychiatry. We have witnessed the rapid progression from anatomical to physiological imaging that has enriched our understanding of brain function in health and disease. Importantly, neuroimaging has provided irrefutable evidence for a biological basis for psychiatric disorders. This offers the hope of improved diagnosis and therapeutic breakthroughs based on pathophysiological rather than behavioural changes.

Europe has a formidable presence in the field of neuroimaging which cannot be captured in a single issue. We like to think of this special issue as the first in a series with more extensive and varied content covered in future issues.

This issue carries an important message; delivering on the promise of improved diagnosis and treatment in mental illness requires coordinate large scale studies combining the power of neuroimaging with that of other disciplines such as genetics and epidemiology. Our specialty's awareness of these evolving techniques and our appreciation of the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders are necessary to ensure that we meet the challenge of providing for our patients.