Psychiatry: Issues for Integrative Neuroscience

This article attempts to address the role of integrative neuroscience in modern psychiatry from nosographic and semiological perspectives. It attempts to compare the need for multidimensional approach with a multi-scale understanding of the mechanisms involved in the emergence of mental disorders. The first part discusses the place of neuroscience in the classification of mental disorders, notably in the delimitation of the normal and the pathological, then the definition of the various psychiatric disorders. The second part focuses on the place of neuroscience in the semiology of mental disorders, more particularly on latent variable and multi-scale approaches. In conclusion, all those issues are confronted with those more ethical of medicine.