Three articles written by David Ross, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, and colleagues with the National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative (NNCI) have been published online by JAMA Psychiatry.
An Integrated Neuroscience Perspective on Formulation and Treatment Planning for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is the first Educational Review in the JAMA journal family. According to Ross, the goal was to offer a new resource to make core neuroscience findings accessible to a broad, clinical audience.
Ross and fellow authors Melissa R. Arbuckle, MD, PhD, of Columbia University and Michael J. Travis, MD, of the University of Pittsburgh wrote that the review “presents a contemporary approach for how to incorporate a modern neuroscience perspective into an integrative case formulation. The article is organized around key neuroscience ‘themes’ most relevant for PTSD. Within each theme, the article highlights how seemingly diverse biological, psychological, and social perspectives all intersect with our current understanding of neuroscience.”
JAMA will pair its Educational Reviews with Clinical Challenges. To accompany their review, Ross, Arbuckle, and Travis wrote the piece, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in a Young Adult Military Veteran, a clinical case study about a veteran of the war in Iraq who suffers from nightmares, intense feelings of guilt, and a feeling of hopelessness due to his experiences in war.
Their third piece, Integrating a Neuroscience Perspective Into Clinical Psychiatry Today, is a Viewpoint that highlights both the importance of incorporating neuroscience into psychiatry training and also some of the challenges intrinsic to this task.
The desire by the authors and others in the field to improve the teaching of neuroscience in psychiatry is what spawned the NNCI. Ross, an Associate Director of the Yale Department of Psychiatry Residency Program, Arbuckle, and Travis are Co-Chairs of NNCI, a collaboration between educators and neuroscientists to create shared resources for effectively teaching neuroscience to psychiatry trainees and to provide faculty training.
Its aim is to create, pilot, and disseminate information that will help train psychiatrists to integrate a modern neuroscience perspective into every facet of their clinical work. This collection reflects the collaboration of diverse residency training programs from across the country, including Yale.
The curriculum is built on principles of adult learning and is adaptable for use in different learning environments. It has been implemented by more than 75 training programs across the United States and internationally.
The work by Ross, Arbuckle, and Travis was the subject of an editorial by JAMA Psychiatry Editor-in-Chief Stephan Heckers, MD, of Vanderbilt University who lauded NNCI as a "remarkable initiative to improve the dissemination of neuroscience knowledge among trainees in psychiatry."