Dr. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, “Environmental risk and resilience mechanisms for psychiatric disorders”

About the Talk: The size and burden of mental illness should ideally prompt a strategy of preemption and early intervention. On the neuroscientific side, this leads to the question of brain mechanisms of risk and resilience for these common and disabling disorder. In this presentation, we review emerging evidence that combines epidemiology, social psychology and neuroscience to bring neural mechanisms of social risk factors for mental illness into focus. In doing so, we discuss existing evidence on the effects of common genetic risk factors in social neural pathways and outline the need for integrative approaches to identify the converging mechanisms of social environmental and genetic risk in brain. On the environmental side, we focus on exposures that have a presumed social component such as urbanicity, migration/refugee status and social status. We propose a specific risk and resilience circuit mediating these effects that links perigenual cingulate cortex to subcortical structures such as ventral striatum and amygdala as well as dorsolateral and anterior medial prefrontal cortex.

• Tost, H., Champagne, F. A., & Meyer-Lindenberg, A. (2015). Environmental influence in the brain, human welfare and mental health. Nat Neurosci, 18(10), 1421-1431. doi:10.1038/nn.4108.

About the Speaker: Prof. Meyer-Lindenberg is Director of the Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Institute, based in Mannheim, Germany, and Professor and Chairman of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Heidelberg in Heidelberg, Germany. He is board certified in psychiatry, psychotherapy, neurology. Before coming to Mannheim in 2007, he spent ten years as a scientist at the National Institutes of Mental Health, Bethesda, USA. His research interests focus on the development of novel treatments for severe psychiatric disorders through an application of multimodal neuroimaging, genetics and enviromics to characterize brain circuits underlying the risk for mental illness. He is the author of more than 480 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and is continuously named as one of the most highly cited scientists in the world (www.isihighlycited.com). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the new Journal of the ECNP Neuroscience Applied.