National Institute of Mental Health abandoning the DSM
Excerpt (1): In the announcement, NIMH Director Thomas Insel says the DSM lacks validity and that “patients with mental disorders deserve better”.
Excerpt (2): “As an alternative approach, Insel suggests the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project, which aims to uncover what it sees as the ‘component parts’ of psychological dysregulation by understanding difficulties in terms of cognitive, neural and genetic differences.”
My comment: This announcement could not make clearer what I’ve been advocating since I first addressed the issues in my most recently published work. My antagonists have exemplified their ignorance of neuroscience in the context of embodied cognition, psychiatry research, evolutionary psychology, and human ethology. Peer review (e.g., by human pheromone-deniers) has limited my contributions with few exceptions, which include 2 award-winning published works with distinguished co-authors: From Fertilization to Adult Sexual Behavior; Human pheromones: integrating neuroendocrinology and ethology.
Excerpts from Kohl (2012) Human pheromones and food odors: epigenetic influences on the socioaffective nature of evolved behaviors. Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology
Section Head: The FDA Critical Path Initiative
Given the importance of understanding how food odors and nutrition epigenetically influence individual survival in other mammals, it is not surprising that a reiteration of the ‘FDA Critical Path Initiative’ (Marts & Resnick, 2007) stresses the need to approach the development of human sexual behavior, which is required for our species survival and beneficial to human well-being, by using the same pathway that links food odors and pheromones to the behavior of honeybees and humans.
Including the interactions among the gene, cell, tissue, organ, organ-system pathway (Wizemann & Pardue, 2001) allows sexual differentiation of the brain and behavior to be detailed in the manner that was suggested by Diamond, Binstock, and Kohl (1996) and more recently by McCarthy and Arnold (2011). These details are in obvious accord with what has been neuroscientifically known for several decades about organization and activation of the brain and behavior (Naftolin, 1981).
Section Head:
Integration of olfactory/pheromonal conditioning into clinical psychology: The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) policy statement
The Public Policy Statement: Definition of Addiction (ASAM, 2011) represents a paradigm shift that may move the current practice of clinical psychology forward. It dictates the adoption and integration of neuroscientific principles that are required in order to understand differences between genetically predisposed brain disease, naturally occurring variations of behavioral development, and choice. These neuroscientific principles include focus on how sensory input influences behavior. The statement specifically mentions food and sex along with drugs and alcohol; each seems to chemically condition changes in hormones and in behavioral responses. Although no link between cause and effect is mentioned by ASAM, these principles could incorporate the GnRH neurophysiological mechanism and levels of LH, which link food odors and pheromones to chemically conditioned behaviors.
See also: G. Zhang et al., “Hypothalamic programming of systemic ageing involving IKK-β, NF-κB and GnRH,” Nature, 2013. And see: Pheromones and the luteinizing hormone for inducing proliferation of neural stem cells and neurogenesis
I am reminded of how Elaine Morgan addressed what happens when a paradigm fails; [Researchers] “carry on as if nothing had ever happened.” Above all, they do not ask questions about the new paradigm, which now (i.e., decades after publications like The Naked Ape; The Aquatic Ape; The Scented Ape; and The Scent of Eros: Mysteries of Odor in Human Sexuality) appears to have helped to cause the NIH to abandon psychiatry’s “Bible”. See her video from a 2009 TED talk.
