Inefficient Neural Self-Stabilization: A theory of spontaneous resolutions and recurrent relapses in psychosis
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- homeostasis, connectivity, graph theory, schizophrenia, antipsychotics
- Copyright
- © 2018 Palaniyappan
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Inefficient Neural Self-Stabilization: A theory of spontaneous resolutions and recurrent relapses in psychosis. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26713v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26713v1
Abstract
A striking feature of psychosis is the heterogeneity of the phenomenon.Presentations of psychosis vary from transient symptoms with no functional consequence in the general population to a tenacious illness on the other extreme, with a wide range of variable trajectories in between. Even among patients with schizophrenia, who are diagnosed on the basis of persistent deterioration, marked variation is seen in response to treatment, frequency of relapses and degree of eventual recovery. Existing theoretical accounts of psychosis almost exclusively focus on how symptoms are initially formed, with much less emphasis on explaining their variable course. In this review, I present an account that links several existing notions on the biology of psychosis with the variant clinical trajectories. My aim is to incorporate perspectives of systems neuroscience in a staging framework to explain the individual variations in illness course that follows the onset of psychosis.
Author Comment
This paper was delivered as the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CCNP) Young Investigator Award Lecture in 2017 at Kingston, Ontario (Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology Annual Meeting). Currently under review at the Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience