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By Ryan Purcell, PhD Jim Schwoebel, presenter at April The Future Now: (NEEDS) Diagnosing schizophrenia can be complex, time-consuming, and expensive. The April seminar on The Future Now: (NEEDs) Neuroscience and Emerging Ethical Dilemmas at Emory focused on one innovative effort to improve this process in the flourishing field of digital phenotyping. Presenter and NeuroLex founder and CEO Jim Schwoebel had witnessed his brother struggle for several years with frequent headaches and anxiety, and saw him accrue nearly $15,000 in medical expenses before his first psychotic break. From there it took many more years and additional psychotic episodes before Jim’s brother began responding to medication and his condition stabilized. Unfortunately, this experience is not uncommon; a recent study found that the median period from the onset of psychotic symptoms until treatment is 74 weeks. Naturally, Schwoebel thought deeply about how this had happened and what clues might have been seen ear...

By Stephen Schueller Image courtesy of Pixabay . If you were to search the Google Play or Apple iTunes store for an app to help support your mental health you’d find a bewildering range of options. This includes nearly 1000 apps focused on depression, nearly 600 focused on bipolar disorder, and 900 focused on suicide (Larsen, Nicholas, & Christensen, 2016). But how much faith should you have that these apps are actually helpful? Or to take an even more grim position, might some apps actually be harmful? Evidence suggests the latter might be true. In one study, researchers who examined the content in publicly available bipolar apps actually found one app, iBipolar , that instructed people to drink hard liquor during a bipolar episode to help them sleep (Nicholas, Larsen, Proudfoot, & Christensen, 2015). Thus, people should definitely approach app stores cautiously when searching for an app to promote their mental health. One reason people might believe such apps could be helpful...

By Karen Herrera-Ferrá, Arleen Salles and Laura Cabrera Karen Herrera-Ferrá, MD, MA lives in Mexico City and founded the Mexican Association of Neuroethics . She has a Post-doctorate in Neuroethics ( Neuroethics Studies Program at the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics (PCCB) at Georgetown University ), a MA on Clinical Psychology, and an MD. She also has a Certificate on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and another one on History of Religions. She has a one-year fellowship on Psychosis and another on OCD. She is currently a PhD Candidate on Bioethics. On May 2016 she developed a national project to formally introduce and develop neuroethics in her country. The main focus of this project is to depict and include national leaders in mental health, interested in neuroethics, so to inform and divulge this discipline among scholars and society. She also works as a mental health clinician in a private hospital, lectures in different hospitals and Universities in Mexico and is an Affiliate...

By Sorab Arora Sorab Arora is currently a Master’s in Public Health student at Emory University , specializing in Healthcare Management and Policy. He has researched health technology design and strategy focused on behavioral medicine, most recently at Northwestern University’s Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies . Arora is a graduate of both the University of Chicago (Summer Business Scholar – 2017) and Grinnell College (2016), where he has bridged social entrepreneurship with mobile technologies and medical innovation.  With median adult smartphone ownership rising to nearly 70% in advanced markets, individuals ranging from wealthy millennials to homeless youth have unprecedented access to mobile technologies (Poushter, 2016; Ben-Zeev et al., 2013). From “swiping” potential soulmates to ordering prescription glasses to one’s door, the proliferation of opportunities for immediate gratification through mobile applications only continues to grow. In what economists have ...

  By Nathan Ahlgrim The Need for Allies Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . Mental healthcare in the United States is in need of serious reform. Mental healthcare is less accessible than other services , and efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act could put adequate care out of reach for millions more Americans. Opposition to mental healthcare reform comes from all sides, with the popular talking points demanding law and order, fiscal responsibility, and moral accountability. Still, the consequences of un- or under-treated people interacting with un- or under-trained authorities are hard to ignore, most strikingly in the criminal justice system. Americans with mental illnesses are sixteen times more likely to be shot by police , and more than half of all inmates in America suffer from mental health problems. Mental health reform, then, stands to benefit the healthcare system, criminal justice, and family structure itself. Given the opposition, legislative policy victories wil...

It is our pleasure to present you with two newly released publications: the second edition of The Neuroethics Blog reader and the 8.4 issue of the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience . Image courtesy of Flickr user Leo Reynolds . The second edition of The Neuroethics Blog reader features the most popular posts on the site, with topics ranging from human knowledge and its enhancement to mental illness to gut feminism. The reader includes posts from luminaries in neuroethics, scientific pioneers, undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars from both within and outside the field of neuroethics.  The Neuroethics Blog , now in its 6th year of creating weekly publications, is pleased to present this reader to you and would like to thank our amazing blog editorial team: Sunidhi Ramesh (Volume Editor of this reader and Assistant Managing Editor), Carlie Hoffman (Managing Editor), Nathan Ahlgrim, Kristie Garza, and Jonah Queen (Supporting Editors and blog contributor...

By Ann E. Fink Ann Fink is currently the Wittig Fellow in Feminist Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with an appointment in Gender and Women’s Studies and concurrent affiliations with Psychology and the Center for Healthy Minds. Her research in cellular and behavioral neuroscience has appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neurophysiology, PNAS and other journals. Ann’s interdisciplinary work addresses the ethics of neuroscience in relation to gender, mental health and social justice.  Emotionality and gender are tied together in the popular imagination in ways that permeate mental health research. At first glance, gender, emotion, and mental health seem like a simple equation: when populations are divided in two, women show roughly double the incidence of depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders 1-3 . Innate biological explanations are easy to produce in the form of genes or hormones. It could be tempting to conclude that being born with XX chr...