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Therapy and prevention for mental health: What if mental diseases are mostly not brain disorders?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

John P. A. Ioannidis
John P. A. Ioannidis*
Affiliation:
Departments of Medicine, Health Research and Policy, and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University School of Medicine; and Department of Statistics, Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences; and Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. jioannid@stanford.eduhttps://profiles.stanford.edu/john-ioannidis
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Abstract

Neurobiology-based interventions for mental diseases and searches for useful biomarkers of treatment response have largely failed. Clinical trials should assess interventions related to environmental and social stressors, with long-term follow-up; social rather than biological endpoints; personalized outcomes; and suitable cluster, adaptive, and n-of-1 designs. Labor, education, financial, and other social/political decisions should be evaluated for their impacts on mental disease.

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Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 42 , 2019 , e13
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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