The History of the Electroencephalography and Clinical Neuroscience Society (ECNS). Part II: The American Psychiatric Electrophysiology Association (APEA): history and mission.

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Despite major strides in understanding the neurobiologyofpsychiatric disorders during the last two decades, and despite the widely accepted belief that the major psychiatric disorders are in large measure brain-based, psychiatric practice continues to depend solely on clinical judgment of the clinician. Although clinical practice ofmedicine relies significantly on ancillary tests, they mainly help guide clinical judgment, and seldom replace it.Making biological tests influence clinical judgment is the next logical step in the evolution ofClinical Psychiatry. Biological testing of psychiatric populations has produced an enormous amount ofdata attesting to the significant brain aberrations associated with psychiatric disorders, but two seemingly insurmountable problems have thus far prevented the results from being clinically useful. First, most ofthe biological abnormalities are not specific to acurrently recognized DSM-IV category. Second, although certain biological tests may be statistically different between groups ofpsychiatric patients and normal control subjects, single abnormalities do not effectively classify individual subjects. Electrophysiologicaltesting ofpsychiatric patients (i.e., electroencephalography (EEG), evoked potentials (EPs), sleep, and eye-movement research), have yielded some of the most consistent and replicated biological findings in psychiatry, most notably the P300 EP and sensory gating changes in thought disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders...) and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep changes indepression. The need for an organization whose sole purpose is to guide the development of the clinical applications ofelectrophysiological techniques in the practice of clinical psychiatry has been obvious for some time. None-the-Iess, it took a significant political event tooccur for such anorganization to emerge. The American Psychiatric Electrophysiology Association (APEA) was established in 1991