UM Star Lecture: Maastricht: Brain, Mind and Not-Knowing: Is Neuroscience relevant to mental health care (GGZ)? (Dutch lecture)
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Over the past year, there has been an increasing number of critical articles in the press about unreliable research. 'Brain science' especially bore the brunt of this. A new branch of science, meta-research, examines the reliability, validity and reproducibility of scientific findings. The results of meta-research in neuroscience are disappointing. The reproducibility of results is low and the statistical basis of many studies is below standard. Researchers make many choices during the design and analysis stages, allowing the findings to subtly move towards the (academic, commercial or fund-raising) interests of the researcher. In the publication stage, journals mainly select 'positive' findings. There is little room for replication - after all, everything is supposed to be 'innovative'. Press reports are appearing about relationships between the brain and depression, autism, psychosis and dementia that are not hard and rely on simplistic relationships between the brain (objective) and experience (subjective). These images find their way into mental health care where patients are asked to place their experiences in a scientistic and pessimistic framework of sick brains and unfavourable prognosis. Universities are facing a major challenge: how can neuroscience once again become relevant to mental health care? How do we limit the influence of the psychology of researchers, publishers and media on research, and - by extension - care?
Jim van Os is Professor of Psychiatry at Maastricht University, head of the Neuro Intervention Centre at the Maastricht Academic Hospital and has been a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences since 2011. He works at the intersection of 'hard' brain science and the subjective experiences of people with 'lived experience' in mental health care. In 2014 he released his book 'Beyond the DSM-5' (De DSM-5 Voorbij), and in 2016 the book Good mental health care! (Goede GGZ!)(together with Philippe Delespaul) in which he described how seemingly spectacular findings in brain science are often unreliable and can furthermore put society on the wrong track in terms of thinking about psychosis, depression and autism spectrum variation. Together with authors such as Trudy Dehue, Anne-Mei The, Paul Verhaeghe, Christien Brinkgreve, Alan Ralston and Wouter Kusters among others, he is a member of 'Babel' - a group which works towards a more pluralistic and sustainable way of doing scientific research and pursues disruptive changes in mental health care, based on new language, concepts and methods in line with the experience of patients.