LAUSR

As Professor J. A. Lieberman wrote in his book, Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, psychiatry has developed from a ‘cult of shrinks into a scientific medicine of the brain.’ Discovery of the neurochemical basis of the effect of psychotropic drugs was the first breakthrough in the scientific understanding of mental disorders. Subsequently, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have succeeded in connecting phenomena of the mind to that in the brain, which has led to the promising new treatment strategy of neurofeedback. Recent genomewide association studies have shown the utility of polygenic risk scores (PRS), and analyses using PRS have confirmed traditional clinical findings, for example, early age at onset in major depression as a risk factor of bipolar disorder. Moreover, development of induced pluripotent cell technology has enabled the analysis of patients’ neurons in vitro for the first time. However, such remarkable progress has not yet caused innovation in clinical practice in psychiatry, and daily practice in clinics is mostly similar to that of several decades ago. Paradoxically, the progress of biological research has obscured the boundary of diagnostic categories: The same classes of drugs are effective for different types of diseases and there is an overlap in genetic, neuroimaging, and cellular findings across different mental disorders. This may indicate that current biological studies in psychiatry have not grown out of understanding mental disorders’ symptomatic-level phenomena. In order to tackle this difficult situation and make psychiatry a science-based medicine of the brain, this journal recognizes that further studies to bridge the gap between clinical and biological research are needed. The journal was first established in 1933 as Folia Psychiatrica et Neurologica Japonica, and became the official journal of the Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology (JSPN) in 1953. Although it was not published by the JSPN from 1975, during the anti-psychiatry era, it returned as the official JSPN journal in 2008. The journal was renamed as the Japanese Journal of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1986, and then as Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences in 1995, when there was a discussion about whether the journal should focus only on ‘clinical’ neuroscience. At that time, modalities for working on clinical neuroscience were still limited, and there was a concern that this constraint might narrow the scope of the journal, resulting in limited visibility reflected by objective measures, such as the impact factor. However, the journal has made a remarkable progress in the last decade, and its 2017 impact factor reached 3.199. This is thanks to our readers, to top scientists worldwide contributing ‘PCN Frontier Reviews’ and excellent original articles, to anonymous reviewers who enable fast and fair review processes, and to editorial board members. The journal has also caught up with the current trend of open science by introducing the open access option. The journal has already become a hub of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience in the Asia–Pacific region, and about two-thirds of the submissions are from outside Japan. We hope that the journal will become an international platform for making psychiatry a clinical neuroscience-based medicine in reality, as well as in name.