Bringing a research base to psychiatry

Abstract

"I n this era of evidence-based medicine, the scarcity of high-quality evidence for mental health care is striking. Mental health practitioners often cannot obtain useful information to guide their clinical decisions, a situation that the director of the US National Institutes of Mental Health described as “the unfortunate current state” in psychiatry, “where too many research studies have little immediate relevance to practice, and too little practice is based on research evidence.”1 This weak foundation impacts the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which each affect about 1% of the population (300 000 Canadians), and depression, which will affect about 8% of Canadians during the course of their lives. What does this mean for patients?"