The Cambridge-UCL Mental Health and Neurosciences Network. (360G-Wellcome-095844_Z_11_Z)

Our aims are to deconstruct current clinical classifications of psychiatric disorders and reformulate abnormal and disabling behaviours in terms of their underlying processing dimensions, based on a neuroscientific understanding of human brain development. We posit that a conventional psychiatric diagnosis is at best an epiphenomenon: the consequence of variability in multiple, developmentally-dependent dimensions of emotion, cognition, behaviour and their associated neurocomputational systems.. This radical and novel approach to characterising mental illness will be realised by defining population variation in key cognitive and behavioural phenotypes and linking these to underlying variation in the development of brain networks measured by structural and functional neuroimaging; the measured characteristics of these networks will be biomarkers for psychiatry. We will focus on the period of youth, 14 to 25 years of age, because this is a developmental epoch associated with major change s in normal cognitive function and brain organization, and (not coincidentally) with a high incidence of serious mental illnesses that continue through the rest of the life course: depressions, psychoses, conduct and personality disorders.