Trials for Computational Psychiatry

Psychiatric disorders affect the higher functions of the brain. Motivation, inference, prediction, memoryand perception all fall prey to psychiatric illnesses. Our understanding of these higher functions has been substantially advanced by computational methods over the past three decades. As such, it became natural to examine how computational methods might help understand and treat mental illnesses. Around a decade ago, interest in what became known as computational psychiatry started to rise. This field has grown substantially, boasting its own journal, conferences, and courses. With the roots of computational psychiatry more in theoretical and neuroscience than clinical fields, research has often focused on the identification of symptomatic correlates of computational processes. As the field is moving towards clinical application, it is starting to engage with causation. Here, we briefly review the origins and outline how the field is moving towards causal approaches using clinical trials.