Understanding How Infectious Diseases Can Impact Cognitive Functionality

Robert Bransfield, MD, DLFAPA, private practice, Psychiatry, in Red Bank, New Jersey, explains how open minds are needed to understand how infections can impact cognitive function and conduct.

Interview Transcript (modified slightly for readability):

“We need open minds to look at this subject because it spans many different disciplines in science, and few people have expertise in all of those areas, so we need to use a multisystem approach. We can’t be narrow and rigid in looking at these problems, and I think that we could really achieve a lot by having a more cooperative scientific effort to understand how infections impact not just cognitive function or emotional impairment, but also conduct, behavior, and productivity.

I see this as a new era in psychiatry; we’ve evolved from psychiatry being demon possession to then being kind to the person and then that would help, and then Freud’s concept of insight, and then looking at the neurochemistry, but then something makes the neurochemistry go wrong. I think if we can understand that then we can help to prevent a lot of chronic things that trouble our society.”