The place of words and numbers in psychiatric research

Table 1 Proposal for a taxonomy of psychiatric research

		Relationships between observations are obtained from
		A) Hermeneutics	B) Statistics	C) Equations
Symbolisation of observations	1) Literary	Psychoanalysis, most transcultural psychiatric studies	Competerized textual analysis	Many neurobiological mechanisms
	2) Locally mathematical	ABAB designs for evaluation of CBT	Epidemiology, Cognitive neuroscience, Brain imaging	Pharmacokinetics of psychotropic drugs, Lacan’s “graphe du désir”
	3) Globally mathematical	Spin glass model of brain functioning	None at the moment in psychiatric research [thermodynamics]	None at the moment in psychiatric research [most of physics]

Objects can be represented globally with mathematics, locally with mathematics or without mathematics. Relationships between these objects can be obtained from a hermeneutic process, from equations or from statistical analyses.

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