How can healthy people help doctors to understand and treat mental illness?
Serious mental illnesses are now understood to be brain disorders. In the past 10 years, researchers have developed new tools, like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which show how the brain is functioning. However, their use for clinical diagnosis remains unproven. In the Center for Cognitive Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, we use fMRI to understand how the brain functions differently in people with mental illnesses, and what tests are best for identifying these problems. What is the Center for Cognitive Medicine? The Center for Cognitive Medicine is part of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Center is dedicated to learning about the causes of brain disorders, and how to better diagnose and treat them. Our current research programs are focused on autism, traumatic brain injury, effects of hormones on brain function, and the early evaluation and treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. As part of our researc
