Ethics and Clinical Neuroinnovation

Book excerpt: New ways of understanding the brain – its nature, its capacities, its function, and its dysfunction – hold great promise for human wellbeing. Novel therapeutics spurred by this understanding have important roles addressing many clinical conditions, including Alzheimer Disease, depression, addiction, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This unique title explores a wide range of groundbreaking sciences and clinical practices for brain-based conditions, including deep brain stimulation, optogenetics, technology-delivered therapies, predictive testing, and new clinical uses of ketamine, cannabis, and other psychoactive substances. An introduction to the imperative to develop new treatments for devastating brain disorders and the state of current therapeutics in psychiatry, addiction, and behavioral disorders is presented, and chapters from leading physician-scientists and neuroethicists outline the clinical and the ethical issues arising in innovation and in the creation of new therapeutics for brain diseases. Written by renowned thought leaders in their fields, the book presents tightly written contributions on novel qualitative and quantitative data from stakeholders in the field, including neuroscientist-clinicians, people living with mental illness and/or addictions, and oversight/policy stakeholders. Concise, anticipatory, and centered on the principles governing human biomedical research and innovation in developing novel therapeutics for brain disorders, Ethics and Clinical Neuroinnovation will be of great value to clinicians, researchers, and students from a vast array of backgrounds, including neuroethics, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, entrepreneurship, and the law.