Thomas A. Ban’s reply to Hector Warnes’ comment on his Neuropsychopharmacology and the Forgotten Language of Psychiatry.

I appreciate Professor Warnes’ comments on my E-Book. With his impressive knowledge,  he touches upon contributions from Antoine Bayle to Charles Shagass with Economo, Hans Berger, Landoll, Penfield, Wernicke, Pavlov, Gantt, Masserman and Lidell in between; expresses concerns about conflicting nosologies based on semiology; puts forward Henry Ey’s “nosological scheme”; points out the lack of validation of DSM-5 and Leonhard’s classification; and shares his belief that in the brain glial cells are as much of importance as neurons. It is unfortunate that by extending the scope of his review, and especially by taking Bayle’s contributions as starting point, he misses a development that lead from Griesinger’s adoption of reflex activity as the basis of all brain activity in the 1840s to the proposition in the early 21^st century that ”nosological homotyping” might provide suitable populations for studying the relationship between mental and neuronal activity. Although in his five pages scholarly comment, he dedicates a paragraph to “nosological homotyping”, he evades to address the central theme of “Forgotten Language” that psychiatric patients based on differences in their abnormal forms (and not content) of their experiences, grouped on the basis of nosological organizing principles (and not diagnoses), provide more homogenous psychiatric populations than psychiatric populations based on any other criteria.

Thomas A. Ban
May 14, 2015