Your brain registers and responds to social situations – eye contact, distance, and subtle movements from others affect your heart rate, pupils, and perspiration. But we don't all react in the same way. Can these individual differences become biomarkers – measurable biological signs – that psychiatry has long sought?
Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry Kamilla Woznica Miskowiak is exploring precisely this question through innovative research. She guides people diagnosed with bipolar disorder, ADHD, borderline, and psychosis through virtual everyday situations, while her research team measures their gaze and bodily responses. Initial results suggest that people with the same diagnosis as a group exhibit similar reaction patterns – but the big questions remain: Can biomarkers be identified that reveal an individual's diagnosis? Can body signals supplement the psychiatrist's conversation in complex cases where multiple disorders overlap?
This topic touches us all. A Danish register study has shown that 82.6 percent of Danes either receive a psychiatric diagnosis at a hospital or are prescribed psychopharmaceuticals during their lifetime. This raises fundamental questions: How precise is the boundary between mental health and illness? Do the reaction patterns that become so intense in some people that they require treatment also exist in milder forms in all of us? And can this understanding change how we judge ourselves and each other?
