Talk:Immuno-psychiatry

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 19 October 2020 and 18 November 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): CLwmed.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:52, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Adding what I found in my open-source search for immuno-psychiatry

Hi everyone, I'm adding what I thought was relevant (history, current theory, mechanisms proposed, associations to MDD/schizophrenia, and current clinical applicability) for this stub that was also open-source. Let me know what you think and if there are any sections that need work. — Preceding unsigned comment added by CLwmed (talk • contribs) 16:57, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Peer-Review of Immuno-psychiatry page

Hello all,

I am writing a peer-review of this page. Overall the article is well-written, touches in the history of immuno-psychiatry, provides ample evidence of how cytokines and immunology principles can affect behavior, and then discusses immunology associations with MDD, schizophrenia, and psychotic behaviors, before finishing with a brief input on the input in clinical medicine.

The lead section gives a clear, concise definition of immuno-psychiatry and how it differs from similar topics. It also does a nice job touching on the idea that it is related to depression, which is discussed later in the article. The information in this section is appropriate but it leaves the reader desiring more - a sentence or summarizing how cytokines actually effect behavior would fit well here because most of the article discusses this topic. There does not seem to be any extraneous information in this portion of the article.

The article is organized in an understandable fashion, first discussing the history of the topic before moving into the modern model of immuno-psychiatry and providing examples. The content of the article also seems appropriate, not getting "off-track" or losing focus of the main information. This information is very technical - describing the intricacies of immunology in a short article. Although the author attempts to clarify some challenging topics with parenthetical definitions and clarifications, it would have been appreciated with there were more links to define challenging topics, or short paraphrases and analogies were added at the end of paragraphs to further clarify topics. For example, tetrahydrobiopterin is defined and a discussion is had surrounding how levels are altered, but how does this relate to the main article? A sentence or two clearly explaining how this affects mood and is this an example of reversible neurotransmitter levels affecting behavior would be appreciated.

The article is very well written in terms of providing a neutral tone towards the topic and data presented. There are no instances in which persuasive language, judgemental terminology, or biased presentation affected the writing of the article. This article discussed a field of study and a subset of evidence pertaining to that field and thus may disqualify itself from requiring a "balance of view points." Perhaps information discussing the validity of this field and its finding could be discussed, but does not seem pertinent and may actually detract from the information present, thus I would not argue it needs differing viewpoints added to the article.

One image with caption is included in the article. The image does provide a nice aesthetic feature to the webpage. The caption is lengthy but appropriately describes what the image is attempting to represent. Although I do not feel the image needs to be removed or lessens the information provided in the article, it does appear to be ancillary information. The image depicts methods of blood-brain barrier transport which is only discussed very briefly in the article. A better use of the space might include depicting general pro-inflammatory cytokines or flow chart representing cytokines affecting NT levels which alter neuronal functioning and ultimately behavior.

All citations except for the image used link to open-source journals available on PubMed. This makes it easy for readers to access sources for further reading/validation if desired. Most citations are from very respectable journals as well. To the best of my knowledge no websites, books, or other forms of media are cited other than journals. This is not a cause for concern but probably relates to the fact that this is a relatively more obscure topic than others. Except for a few exceptions the information written is easily attributed to a citation. There are three examples (paragraph 3, 4, and one under "How Inflammatory Cytokines Can Disrupt Cortisol...") in which the end of a paragraph appears to have several sentences of new information without a citation. I would very much like to see those comments attributed to a source because it appears unlikely that that information was of the authors own knowledge.

Lastly, the article feels complete, there are no obviously blank or unfinished sections. Although this article left me wondering how a few of the examples tied back to the main topic, it is well written and admirably attempts to distill a very challenging topic into a concise, understandable article. Well done. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Peterbeck22 (talk • contribs) 20:19, 20 April 2022 (UTC)