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What do contemporary findings in hemisphere differences tell us about the nature of mental illness? A Literature Review
Brandon Burt
Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK
The Abstract
Abstract Body

Background: Recent findings demonstrate and explain asymmetries in function of the two hemispheres and the concomitant experience of each hemispheres differential activation. Neuroimaging of individuals with mental illnesses demonstrate clear hemisphere asymmetries (e.g., autism and schizophrenia). The relationship between hemisphere asymmetries in many mental illnesses and the impact on the conceptualization of psychopathology has yet to be thoroughly reviewed.

Aims: Review and explain how hemisphere asymmetries seen in mental illnesses are intertwined with the experience of mental illness and delineate the impact of hemisphere asymmetries on mainstream conceptualizations of psychopathology.

Method: Peer-reviewed journals were searched using online databases (ScienceDirect, SCOPUS and Embase) for neuroimaging and reviews of hemisphere asymmetries (for now exclusively) in depression, anorexia, schizophrenia, autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Results were synthesized with recent theories of asymmetries in hemisphere function and conceptualization of mental illnesses.

Results: Hemisphere asymmetries are typical to the psychopathologies searched for: OCD was left lateralized to the frontal lobe. Schizophrenia, anorexia and autism are left lateralized widely and have right-hemisphere deficits. Whereas depression is right lateralized to the frontal lobe.

Discussion: These findings support notions of robust differential function of each hemisphere and that differential activation of the hemispheres changes how humans attend and experience the world. Through asymmetrical hemisphere activation schizophrenia, OCD, anorexia and autism provides a worldview overly characteristic of the left hemisphere whereas depressed patients excessively of the right. Hemisphere asymmetries provide further support for biological aetiology of psychopathology and both a transdiagnostic and categorical view of psychopatholog

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