Psychedelics are a group of psychoactive substances that alter consciousness and produce marked shifts in sensory perception, cognition, and mood. Although psychedelics have been used by indigenous communities for centuries, they have only recently been investigated as an adjunctive therapeutic tool in psychotherapy. Since the early twentieth century, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has been explored for the treatment of several neuropsychiatric conditions characterized by rigid thought patterns and treatment resistance. However, this rapidly emerging field of neuroscience has evolved alongside opposition in several areas, including the affiliation with mid-twentieth century counterculture movements, media sensationalization, legislative restriction, and scientific criticisms such as “breaking the blind” and “excessive enthusiasm.” This perspective article explores the historical opposition to psychedelic research and the implications for the credibility of the field. In the midst of psychedelic drug policy reform, drawing lessons from historical events will contribute to clinical research efforts in psychiatry.

This response engages critically with Harzheim’s review of Thomas Fuchs’ In Defense of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology. Fuchs’ work offers a profound exploration of embodied cognition, arguing that human cognition and existence are deeply shaped by our physical interactions. Harzheim’s critique highlights significant aspects of Fuchs’ framework, including his critique of functionalist models, the impact of transhumanist technologies, and ethical concerns in healthcare technology. This paper extends Harzheim’s review by proposing an integration of functionalist and embodied cognitive models, emphasizing the need for a comprehensive evaluation of technological impacts, and advocating for a more robust ethical framework that considers social equity. Additionally, it addresses the is-ought distinction and explores the implications of technological advancements on human identity and mental health. Doede’s critique is also discussed, underscoring the importance of integrating diverse cognitive models and addressing technological determinism. Overall, this response calls for a more nuanced and inclusive approach to the discourse on embodied cognition, aiming to enrich the scholarly conversation and address the complexities and implications of Fuchs’ analysis.

The cognitive deterioration of politicians is a critical emerging issue. As professions including law and medicine develop and implement cognitive assessments, their insights may inform the proper strategy within politics. The aging, lifetime-appointed judiciary raises legal and administrative questions of such assessments, while testing of older physicians experiencing cognitive decline provides real-life examples of implementation. In politics, cognitive assessment must contend with the field’s unique challenges, also taking context-dependent interpretations of cognitive-neuropsychological status into account. These perspectives, from legal and medical experts, political scientists, and officeholders, can contribute toward an equitable, functioning, and non-discriminatory system of assessing cognition that educates the public and enables politicians to maintain their public responsibilities. With proper implementation and sufficient public knowledge, we believe cognitive assessments for politicians, particularly political candidates, can be valuable for maintaining properly functioning governance. We offer recommendations on the development, implementation, and execution of such assessments, grappling with their democratic and legal implications.

We review the origins and history of community psychiatry and the challenges posed to it by advancing technology and the neoliberal political economy and society that have prevailed since the 1990s. We summarise both achievements and shortcomings and argue that the term ‘community’ fails to acknowledge the gap between its original ambition and the outcomes of its implementation. We argue that, because of the changes that have taken place, the implementation of community psychiatry's objectives as conceived originally is likely to continue to fail. To sharpen current awareness and thinking and optimise future policy discourse and service strategies we revisit the concept of ‘metacommunity’. This is a historical descriptive label that aims to encapsulate the fundamental transformations that have taken place. These in turn demand of psychiatrists and other mental health providers both more socially critical thinking and mental health activism in the public sphere. Ultimately, beyond both community and metacommunity psychiatry, what is required is a democratic psychiatry.

Mainstream psychiatric practice requires a solid grounding in neuroscience, an important part of the biopsychosocial model, allowing for holistic person-centred care. There have been repeated calls for better integration of neuroscience into training, although so far with less focus on implementation for life-long learning. We suggest that such training should be accessible and utilised by all psychiatrists, not solely those with a special interest in neuropsychiatry. By considering recent positive developments within the general psychiatry curricula and neuropsychiatric resource implementation, we propose strategies for how this can be progressed, minimising regional disparities within the growing world of virtual learning.

This special issue attempts to integrate personality, psychopathology, and neuroscience as means to improve understanding of specific traits and trait structures in humans. The key strategy is to dive into comparative research using a range of species to provide simple models. This strategy has, as its foundation, the fact that the most basic functions, and their supporting neural systems, are highly conserved in evolution. The papers collected in the issue show that, from fish, through rats, to primates, the homologies in brain systems and underlying functions (despite species-specific forms of expression) allow simpler cases to provide insights into the neurobiology behind more complex ones including human. Our introductory editorial paper to this special issue took a bottom-up approach, starting with the genetics of conserved brain systems and working up to cognition. Here, we deconstruct the different aspects of personality, progressing from more complex ones in primates to least complex in fish. With the primate section, we summarize papers that discuss the factors that contribute to sociability in primates and how they apply to healthy and pathological human personality traits. In the rat section, the focus is driven by psychopathology and the way that “high” strains selected for extreme behaviors can illuminate the neurobiology of motivated responses to environmental cues. The section on fish summarizes papers that look into the most fundamental emotional reactions to the environment that are governed by primitive and conserved brain structures. This raises metatheoretical questions on the nature of traits and to a section that asks “which animals have personalities.” We believe that the issue as a whole provides a nuanced answer to this question and shines a new, comparative, light on the interpretation of personality structure and the effects on it of evolution.

Like other animals, fish have unique personalities that can affect their cognition and responses to environmental stressors. These individual personality differences are often referred to as “behavioural syndromes” or “stress coping styles” and can include personality traits such as boldness, shyness, aggression, exploration, locomotor activity, and sociability. For example, bolder or proactive fish may be more likely to take risks and present lower hypothalamo–pituitary–adrenal/interrenal axis reactivity as compared to shy or reactive individuals. Likewise, learning and memory differ between fish personalities. Reactive or shy individuals tend to have faster learning and better association recall with aversive stimuli, while proactive or bold individuals tend to learn more quickly when presented with appetitive incentives. However, the influence of personality on cognitive processes other than cognitive achievement in fish has been scarcely explored. Cognitive bias tests have been employed to investigate the interplay between emotion and cognition in both humans and animals. Fish present cognitive bias processes (CBP) in which fish’s interpretation of stimuli could be influenced by its current emotional state and open to environmental modulation. However, no study in fish has explored whether CBP, like in other species, can be interpreted as long-lasting traits and whether other individual characteristics may explain its variation. We hold the perspective that CBP could serve as a vulnerability factor for the onset, persistence, and recurrence of stress-related disorders. Therefore, studying fish’s CBP as a state or trait and its interactions with individual variations may be valuable in future efforts to enhance our understanding of anxiety and stress neurobiology in animal models and humans.

This article concentrates on what historians have borrowed and adapted from neighbouring disciplines in the last few decades, rather than what they have lent (much more rarely). It discusses the ‘social turn’ of the 1960s, the movements for historical anthropology and ‘psychohistory (drawing on psychoanalysis) in the 1970s, the literary turn of the 1980s (ranging from the poetics of history to the analysis of ‘fiction in the archives’), the history of ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ memory, the rise of the history of gender, and the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1990s. In those forty years, historians were often in dialogue with social scientists and with other scholars in the humanities. In the 21st century, by contrast, there has been a rapprochement with experimental psychology and neuroscience (in the case of studies of memory and emotion) and with biology, culminating – so far – in a ‘bio-history’ concerned with the co-evolution of humans and animals. The famous opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is melting away.