Repetitive Skin Focused Disorders May Express a Functional Connectome.
Repetitive skin focused behaviors, such as nail biting, hair pulling, cutting, and others may involve brain regions that participate in visual and tactile awareness, contextual learning and anxiety. Advances in neuroscience are occurring alongside wildly expanding clinical needs in depression and suicide, delirium and dementia.
Individuals contemplating suicide or harm to others are interfacing with health care systems that are either not recognizing those at risk or are not putting the riskiest patients in front of the clinicians with the greatest diagnostic acumen. Clinicians rely on what the patient says, how they say it, and often include performance and cognitive measures to assign a diagnosis. Many patients seen for routine medical exams have unrecognized needs for mental health care.
Research on neural function has little uniformity and diagnostic categorizations do not scale across providers and researchers. Our most basic clinical needs, the need to identify those at risk for self-harm and harm to others, are not being met. Repetitive skin focused disorders may reflect potentiated and possibly toxic communication between the thalamus, amygdala, locus coeruleus,
insula, and hippocampus. The development of fully characterized phenotypes around repetitive skin focused disorders may provide a ‘risk signature’ that would scale across provider types.
The effect of oral contraceptives and menstrual cycle phase on fear, memory, and anxiety remain largely unknown. Women approach medical care differently, being open to taking prescriptions while also showing interest in natural approaches that include supplements and self-directed care.
The development of fully characterized phenotypes around repetitive skin focused disorders may trigger clinical decision support in three key areas; mental health issues that emerge at puberty, adults at risk for polypharmacy and individuals with suicidal ideation.
Soc Behav Res Pract Open J. 2019; 4(1): 1-7. doi: 10.17140/SBRPOJ-4-114
