Thomas R. Insel Quotes

#1. 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.

Thomas R. Insel

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

Thomas R. Insel

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

Thomas R. Insel

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

Thomas R. Insel

#5. Reports that online cognitive behavioral treatment can be as effective as in-person psychotherapy suggest that technology will expand access, extend the impact of a therapist, and expedite treatment for people who might not find 'seeing' a therapist acceptable.

Thomas R. Insel

#6. In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in asylums, later known as state hospitals.

Thomas R. Insel

#7. The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention.

Thomas R. Insel

#8. 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.

Thomas R. Insel

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

Thomas R. Insel

#10. 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.

Thomas R. Insel

#11. 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.

Thomas R. Insel

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

Thomas R. Insel

#13. After a century of studying schizophrenia, the cause of the disorder remains unknown.

Thomas R. Insel

#14. Sometimes, patients with serious mental illness, just as with other serious medical illnesses, require hospitalization. In the absence of available public or private hospital beds, there are few options.

Thomas R. Insel

#15. 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.

Thomas R. Insel

#16. When we talk about the brain, it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic.

Thomas R. Insel

#17. 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.

Thomas R. Insel