Neuropsychiatry Clinic
Neuropsychiatry could as easily be called psychiatry clinic as the field begins to view psychiatric conditions through a biological lens. Generally, the patients that get triaged into neuropsychiatry clinic fall into 4 major categories:
1) psychiatric complaints in the setting of other neurological conditions (multiple sclerosis, Parkinson, TBI, etc.).
2) functional neurological disorders
3) behavioral complaints in intellectually disabled populations
4) cognitive complaints (sometimes these are filtered into behavioral neurology clinic)
When assessing a patient presenting with behavioral or affective symptoms in the setting of neuropathology, consider the following three contributions:
1) What are the potentially disrupted neural circuits
2) What is the patient’s premorbid baseline – a common pitfall in neuropsychiatry is reducing the patient to their neurological condition
3) What is the psychological impact of the neurological illness on the patient