Workshop Summary

The Foundation for Psychocultural Research funded the Inaugural Workshop of the Social-Cultural Computational Psychiatry and Neuroscience Network (SCCPNN), which took place from November 4–8, 2019, in Montreal.

The SCCPNN is a new network for multidisciplinary research in social-cultural computational psychiatry, a novel discipline that applies computational tools to the study of neural processes and cognition in health and illness. This project builds on recent advances in the study of multiscale system dynamics in the neurosciences, social and behavioral sciences, and computational modeling to advance the emerging discipline of computational psychiatry, with a focus on social and cultural aspects of brain function.

Computational psychiatry is a novel discipline that applies computational tools to the study of the mechanisms of psychiatric disorders and to the delivery of mental health care. To date, this has focused on brain-based models of disorder and integrating neuroscience data into clinical assessment. The SCCPNN aims to extend this work to integrate computational psychiatry with the study of sociocultural contexts and processes.

Maxwell Ramstead, Douglas Utting Fellow at Jewish General Hospital and McGill University, founded the SCCPNN in 2018. The network brings together researchers and clinicians involved in cutting-edge research in neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. The inaugural workshop was particularly timely, as these techniques are just now being developed, and there is no standard framework or pipeline for combining these techniques in multidisciplinary collaborative research.