Neurological and psychiatric diseases constitute the most urgent health and social challenges on a global scale. The Project deals with salient challenges of contemporary research and clinical neuroethics, addressing the responsible experimentation as well as the accessible and respectful healthcare for neurological and psychiatric patients. A major goal of this project is to evaluate the social and cultural impacts that biologically-based interventions on the brain have had in the past and have today on our theoretical understanding and categorizing on the nature of mental disorders and socially dissonant behavior. The project celebrates two anniversaries for Sapienza. The first is the invention of the electro-shock apparatus, designed and tested in 1938 at Sapienza and now owned and
displayed at the Sapienza Museum of the History of Medicine, where the project will take place. Moreover, 2019 will be the centenary of the foundation of the Clinic of Nervous and Mental Diseases at Sapienza University Hospital.
The project aims at promoting responsible conduct and informed decision-making in mental healthcare. It intends to foster neuroscientific research by drawing attention to the scientific achievements in the ongoing development of the field, also in a historical perspective, so to avoid possible prejudicial misconceptions or mystification of the neurosciences and critically assess their benefits and limitations. This Project is ascribable to neuroethics, an innovative multidisciplinary field with a cultural, social and public role, well-developed in the U.S. and flourishing in Italy and worldwide. Contemporary neuroethics scholarship offers a new lens to investigate the historical developments of brain testing and treatments. The project is theoretical. It will include historical-philosophical investigations. It intersects research and clinical domains of neuroethics in a multidisciplinary perspective and it will follow a naturalistic approach.
Contemporary neuroethics scholarship offers a new lens to investigate the historical developments of brain testing and treatments. A major goal of this project is to evaluate the social and cultural impacts that biologically-based interventions on the brain have had in the past historical centuries and have today on our theoretical understanding and categorizing on the nature of mental disorders and socially dissonant behavior. A neuroethical approach engages bidirectional influences between neuroscience and ethics, in so far as it explores how the introduction of reductionist and mechanistic approaches on the mind-brain (in a spectrum from the more radicals to the more pluralistic) have historically affected the representation of our commonsense notions of consciousness, rationality, personhood, free will, and so on. In the contemporary era of evidence-based neuroscience, these issues affect the problem of re-evaluating these notions and correlated clinical diagnoses, especially those based on historically biased categorizations.