Thomas R. Insel Quotes

Nearly every business collects metrics on inventory, sales, and workplace process. Health care has been slow to measure these kinds of outcomes. Increasingly, general medicine, via either managed care or large practice settings, is improving by collecting data through electronic records and refining practice based on what works.

My philosophy is really based on humility. I don't think we know enough to fix either diagnostics or therapeutics. The future of psychiatry is clinical neuroscience, based on a much deeper understanding of the brain.

As a scientist leading a funding agency for autism research, I think of autism as a neurodevelopmental disorder.

I was sure I was going to be a doctor of global health or tropical medicine in some underdeveloped country.

A National Database on Autism Research is fostering sharing of data and collaborations. Scientists are also making great strides at the interface of biology and engineering with new technologies that are laying the groundwork for future advances.

From wearable sensors to video game treatments, everyone seems to be looking to technology as the next wave of innovation for mental health care.

What causes autism? As far as we know in 2013, there is no single gene or single environmental factor that accounts for the more than 1 million Americans with ASDs.

I trained in psychiatry in the 1970s, and much of our training was about what was then psychoanalytic theory, with a little bit of theory from Jungian psychology and a few other places.

With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, more people will have insurance coverage and, in principle, be eligible for more care.

The Holy Grail of neuroscience has been to understand how and where information is encoded in the brain.

For bipolar in adults, I think there's pretty good agreement about what this looks like. For bipolar in children, there is some considerable debate about where are the boundaries. At the mild end, are these just kids who are active? Is this the class clown at the very severe - is this something other than a mood disorder?

We need to ask whether, in the long term, some individuals with a history of psychosis may do better off medication.

We have to remain humble about our understanding of the brain, because even our most powerful tools remain pretty blunt instruments for decoding the brain. In fact, we still do not know how to decipher the basic language of how the brain works.