2024-2025 Academic Year

Fall 2024

PSYC 210 Analysis of Psychological Data
Permission of Instructor Required. Completion of both PYSC 210 and PSYC 211 fulfills the WID requirement.

PSYC 480 The Biology of Mental Illness
Permission of Instructor Required. Is clinical depression a brain disease? Do clinically depressed individuals suffer from a “chemical imbalance”? Is clinical depression best treated with antidepressant medications? For better-or-worse, modern psychiatry has answered “yes” to these questions. Yet is this the “correct” answer? Is conceptualizing mental illnesses such as clinical depression and drug addiction as brain diseases correct and are biologically focused therapies the best strategy in the treatment of mental illness? Clinical Neuroscience is a new and exciting subfield of neuroscience, one that focuses on the understanding of mental illness from a neurobiological perspective. In this course, we will review mental illness from a neurobiological perspective, focusing on how modern neuroscientific research has helped inform us about the etiology, prognosis and treatment of mental illness. Along the way, we discuss “other” perspectives (popular and first-person) on mental illness and how these other, non-scientific perspectives contribute to our understanding (or misunderstanding) of mental illnesses. We too will critically evaluate the neuroscientific perspective, discussing the limitations and problems associated with this approach to the understanding of mental illness. Finally, modern neuroscience has given way (and continues to give way) to modern technologies (brain scans, designer drugs, etc.) for use in clinical as well as non-clinical settings. While the emergence of these modern technologies has provided benefits to society, their use also raises ethical questions. For example, should medical drugs (e.g., Ritalin) be used/prescribed for non-medical reasons? In this course, we will discuss some ethical considerations that stem from the development of neuroscientifically-based technologies.

NRSC 560 Stu/Faculty Collaborative Rsch

PSYC 560 Stu/Faculty Collaborative Rsch