Psych CASC / OSCE · Foundations — basic neuroscience for psychiatry
Explain basic brain science of psychosis and treatment to a family — CASC communication station
MRCPsych/FRANZCP-style CASC: plain-language neuroscience for families, method limits, dopamine pathway side-effect counselling, and recovery framing.
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Station brief
Format. Communication station, approximately 7–10 minutes after reading. You are the psychiatry registrar in an early-psychosis service. [1]
Candidate instructions. Build rapport with parents. Explain psychosis using accessible network/dopamine language without chemical-imbalance cartoons. Address scans (when useful, what they cannot prove). Discuss how antipsychotics modulate dopamine pathways including intended effects and common adverse-effect logic (movement, prolactin). Place cannabis as a risk amplifier, not moral blame. Invite questions; outline next steps including organic screening when indicated and psychosocial recovery. Avoid jargon dumps and false certainty. [1][2][3]
References4ShowHide
- [1]Howes OD, Kapur S The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia: version III--the final common pathway Schizophr Bull, 2009.PMID 19325164
- [2]Abi-Dargham A, Rodenhiser J, Printz D, et al. Increased baseline occupancy of D2 receptors by dopamine in schizophrenia Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2000.PMID 10884434
- [3]Logothetis NK, Pauls J, Augath M, et al. Neurophysiological investigation of the basis of the fMRI signal Nature, 2001.PMID 11449264
- [4]Insel T, Cuthbert B, Garvey M, et al. Research domain criteria (RDoC): toward a new classification framework for research on mental disorders Am J Psychiatry, 2010.PMID 20595427