Back to the Future: On the Road Towards Precision Psychiatry, Volume II

However, in the last months of 2019, a new virus was detected in Wuhan China that would wreak havoc around the world for more than two years. This was SARS-CoV-2 which eventually infected more than 57% of people worldwide at least once, as of April 22, 2022 (2).In addition to dire effects on individual health and disruptions to society and the healthcare services, the virus had a devastating effect on mental health conditions with increases seen in depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This was compounded by the fact that fewer individuals suffering from these disorders attempted to seek help from the healthcare services due to government restrictions or because the affected individuals did not think their problem was serious enough or they had fears about contracting the virus (3).The reduced access of face-to-face mental healthcare during periods of disaster such as the pandemic called for novel solutions for continuity of patient management. Guest et al. describe the increased use of remote digital tools to promote and maintain efficacious therapeutics for individuals with psychiatric disorders (4). These platforms have been used as effective diagnostics, patient monitoring and treatment alternatives for people in all walks of life and professionals, including frontline healthcare workers who experienced repeated traumas during the pandemic. Digital approaches such as artificial intelligence-guided chatbots, activity-based apps and computer gameplay can be effective in improving symptoms like depression, posttraumatic stress and anxiety. They concluded that it is important to continue investing in these technologies to drive forward their integration into clinical practice. This will be especially useful during times when access to the standard facilities are restricted as in disaster scenarios. Ironically, this is a time when they will most likely be of the greatest need.One of the fundamental challenges in neuroscience is to understand how brain activity patterns relate to behaviour. Levine and Schwarzbach describe how the multivariate technique of representational similarity analysis (RSA) can be used in combination with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect these patterns (5). This method has improved our understanding of the mechanisms involved in information encoding in local activity patterns and how these differ in individuals with and without psychiatric disorders, such as PTSD (6).The authors concluded that leveraging individualized behavioural patterns and task-related characteristics will lead to improvements in neuroimaging studies of mental depictions. This should allow analyses of differences in mental representations between individuals and to test hypotheses related to mental illnesses…