Nickname | POWIC |
---|---|
Founder | SANE |
Headquarters | Oxford |
Honorary science director | Tim Crow |
Website | Centre website |
The Prince of Wales International Centre for SANE Research (POWIC) in Oxford houses investigations into finding the causes of and better treatment for serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and depression. [1]
In 2003, [2] POWIC was built with donations from the Xylas shipping family, the late King of Saudi Arabia Fahd bin Abdel Aziz Al-Said, and the Sultan of Brunei. [3] The building was formally opened by SANE's Patron, The Prince of Wales in February 2003, although the scientific programme had been running for the previous nine years. Support for POWIC was encouraged by SANE's founder and chief executive Marjorie Wallace (SANE) CBE.
Prior to the formation of SANE in 1986 there was a considerable paucity of research interest in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. One of the charity's endeavors has been to initiate and fund research into the causes and treatments of mental illness. [4]
In order to focus research efforts, SANE established POWIC in conjunction with the research psychiatrist Professor Tim Crow. [2] Crow was appointed the honorary scientific director of SANE based at the Department of Psychiatry at Warneford Hospital, part of Oxford University. [2] SANE raised £3.5 million to establish centre on the Warneford Hospital site. The specially designed and purpose built centre includes office and laboratory space, as well as conference and library facilities.
The aims of POWIC are: [5]
Crow has been studying schizophrenia for over 20 years, and he and his research group have been developing and researching a specific hypothesis about the origins of psychosis - that it is associated with the unique human capacity for language. Crow arrived at this hypothesis by bringing together the fact that schizophrenia only appears to occur in humans and not in our closest relatives, chimpanzees. The same can be said of brain asymmetry (the left and right sides of the brain, which are basically the same, being different in size). Brain asymmetry has been linked to the capacity for language.
POWIC's quest for an organic basis for mental illness is pursued using three levels of explanation:
The Dalai Lama, who visited Oxford in 2008, gave his support to the new Centre and the scientific examination of the Mindfulness approach: "My primary concern is not to propagate religion, but to benefit humanity. It is certainly right to use Buddhist techniques like mindfulness to alleviate suffering in this life."
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is a 1976 book by the Princeton psychologist, psychohistorian and consciousness theorist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997). It explores the nature of consciousness – particularly "the ability to introspect" – and its evolution in ancient human history. Jaynes proposes that consciousness is a learned behavior rooted in language and culture rather than being innate. He distinguishes consciousness from sensory awareness and cognition. Jaynes introduces the concept of the "bicameral mind", a non-conscious mentality prevalent in early humans that relied on auditory hallucinations.
A mental disorder is an impairment of the mind disrupting normal thinking, feeling, mood, behavior, or social interactions, and accompanied by significant distress or dysfunction. The causes of mental disorders are very complex and vary depending on the particular disorder and the individual. Although the causes of most mental disorders are not fully understood, researchers have identified a variety of biological, psychological, and environmental factors that can contribute to the development or progression of mental disorders. Most mental disorders result in a combination of several different factors rather than just a single factor.
Forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the FOXP2 gene. FOXP2 is a member of the forkhead box family of transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene expression by binding to DNA. It is expressed in the brain, heart, lungs and digestive system.
Edwin Fuller Torrey, is an American psychiatrist and schizophrenia researcher. He is associate director of research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI) and founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), a nonprofit organization whose principal activity is promoting the passage and implementation of outpatient commitment laws and civil commitment laws and standards in individual states that allow people diagnosed with mental illness to be forcibly committed and medicated easily throughout the United States.
In philosophy of self, self-awareness is the experience of one's own personality or individuality. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one's body and environment, self-awareness is the recognition of that consciousness. Self-awareness is how an individual experiences and understands their own character, feelings, motives, and desires.
Timothy John Crow is a British psychiatrist and researcher from Oxford. Much of his research is related to the causes of schizophrenia. He also has an interest in neurology and the evolutionary theory. He is the Honorary Director of the Prince of Wales International Centre for Research into Schizophrenia and Depression. He qualified at the Royal London Hospital in 1964 and obtained a PhD at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1970. He is a fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Psychiatrists and the Academy of Medical Sciences. Crow was for twenty years Head of the Division of Psychiatry of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Clinical Research Centre at Northwick Park Hospital and then a member of the External Scientific staff of the MRC in Oxford.
The planum temporale is the cortical area just posterior to the auditory cortex within the Sylvian fissure. It is a triangular region which forms the heart of Wernicke's area, one of the most important functional areas for language. Original studies on this area found that the planum temporale was one of the most asymmetric regions in the brain, with this area being up to ten times larger in the left cerebral hemisphere than the right.
Biological psychiatry or biopsychiatry is an approach to psychiatry that aims to understand mental disorder in terms of the biological function of the nervous system. It is interdisciplinary in its approach and draws on sciences such as neuroscience, psychopharmacology, biochemistry, genetics, epigenetics and physiology to investigate the biological bases of behavior and psychopathology. Biopsychiatry is the branch of medicine which deals with the study of the biological function of the nervous system in mental disorders.
SANE is a UK mental health charity working to improve quality of life for people affected by mental illness.
The biopsychiatry controversy is a dispute over which viewpoint should predominate and form a basis of psychiatric theory and practice. The debate is a criticism of a claimed strict biological view of psychiatric thinking. Its critics include disparate groups such as the antipsychiatry movement and some academics.
Risk factors of schizophrenia include many genetic and environmental phenomena. The prevailing model of schizophrenia is that of a special neurodevelopmental disorder with no precise boundary or single cause. Schizophrenia is thought to develop from very complex gene–environment interactions with vulnerability factors. The interactions of these risk factors are intricate, as numerous and diverse medical insults from conception to adulthood can be involved. The combination of genetic and environmental factors leads to deficits in the neural circuits that affect sensory input and cognitive functions. Historically, this theory has been broadly accepted but impossible to prove given ethical limitations. The first definitive proof that schizophrenia arises from multiple biological changes in the brain was recently established in human tissue grown from patient stem cells, where the complexity of disease was found to be "even more complex than currently accepted" due to cell-by-cell encoding of schizophrenia-related neuropathology.
Marjorie Shiona Wallace CBE is a British investigative journalist, author, and broadcaster. She is also the Founder and Chief Executive of mental health charity SANE.
In human neuroanatomy, brain asymmetry can refer to at least two quite distinct findings:
Neuroscience Research Australia is an independent medical research institute based in Sydney, Australia. Previously called the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, the institute relaunched as Neuroscience Research Australia on 1 June 2010. NeuRA is accredited by the National Health and Medical Research Council.
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The imprinted brain hypothesis is an unsubstantiated hypothesis in evolutionary psychology regarding the causes of autism spectrum and schizophrenia spectrum disorders, first presented by Bernard Crespi and Christopher Badcock in 2008. It claims that certain autistic and schizotypal traits are opposites, and that this implies the etiology of the two conditions must be at odds.
The evolution of schizophrenia refers to the theory of natural selection working in favor of selecting traits that are characteristic of the disorder. Positive symptoms are features that are not present in healthy individuals but appear as a result of the disease process. These include visual and/or auditory hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and major thought disorders. Negative symptoms refer to features that are normally present but are reduced or absent as a result of the disease process, including social withdrawal, apathy, anhedonia, alogia, and behavioral perseveration. Cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia involve disturbances in executive functions, working memory impairment, and inability to sustain attention.
Evolutionary psychiatry, also known as Darwinian psychiatry, is a theoretical approach to psychiatry that aims to explain psychiatric disorders in evolutionary terms. As a branch of the field of evolutionary medicine, it is distinct from the medical practice of psychiatry in its emphasis on providing scientific explanations rather than treatments for mental disorder. This often concerns questions of ultimate causation. For example, psychiatric genetics may discover genes associated with mental disorders, but evolutionary psychiatry asks why those genes persist in the population. Other core questions in evolutionary psychiatry are why heritable mental disorders are so common how to distinguish mental function and dysfunction, and whether certain forms of suffering conveyed an adaptive advantage. Disorders commonly considered are depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, eating disorders, and others. Key explanatory concepts are of evolutionary mismatch and the fact that evolution is guided by reproductive success rather than health or wellbeing. Rather than providing an alternative account of the cause of mental disorder, evolutionary psychiatry seeks to integrate findings from traditional schools of psychology and psychiatry such as social psychology, behaviourism, biological psychiatry and psychoanalysis into a holistic account related to evolutionary biology. In this sense, it aims to meet the criteria of a Kuhnian paradigm shift.
Daniel R. Weinberger is a professor of psychiatry, neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and Director and CEO of the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, which opened in 2011.
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by persistent hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and thought disorder. These experiences are evident in multiple sensory modalities and include deviation in all facets of thought, cognition, and emotion. Compared to other psychological disorders like major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), schizophrenia has significantly higher heritability. Schizophrenia has been found to present cross-culturally, and it almost always has 0.1% prevalence in a given population, although some studies have cast doubts on this. It has been hypothesized that schizophrenia is unique to human beings and has existed for a long time.