Kan vi snart aflæse psykisk sygdom i kroppens signaler?

When you are standing in a lift with strangers or heading to a meeting in your boss’s office, your brain registers far more than you have time to consciously consider. Glances, distances and small movements can cause changes in your heart rate, pupils and sweat production.

But we do not all react in the same way. Could these differences become biomarkers for mental disorders – measurable biological signs that psychiatry has long lacked?

This is what Kamilla Woznica Miskowiak, professor of cognitive neuropsychiatry, is investigating. Her study participants have been diagnosed with conditions including bipolar disorder, ADHD, borderline personality disorder and psychosis. They move through everyday situations created in VR while researchers track their gaze and bodily responses.

The initial studies show that people with the same diagnoses can, as a group, have similar response patterns – time will tell whether it is possible to identify a biomarker that can reveal an individual’s diagnosis. But perhaps combinations of bodily signals could one day supplement a psychiatrist’s conversation with a patient – for example when several disorders overlap, or the most apparent diagnosis obscures another.

And this subject concerns far more people than those currently receiving psychiatric treatment: a Danish register-based study has shown that 82.6 per cent of us either receive a psychiatric diagnosis in hospital or have a prescription for psychiatric medication dispensed during our lifetime.

So how clear-cut is the boundary between mental health and mental illness? Do the response patterns that become so pronounced in some people that they require treatment exist in milder forms in all of us? And could that understanding help us judge both ourselves and one another less harshly?

On stage:

Kamilla Woznica Miskowiak, clinical professor of cognitive neuropsychiatry and head of the ‘Neurocognition and Emotion Across Disorders of the Brain’ (NEAD) Centre at Institut for Klinisk Medicin, Københavns Universitet, and Psykiatrisk Center København, Bispebjerg og Frederiksberg Hospital.