Zoom Talk: Lena Kästner (Saarland) and Jürgen Landes (MCMP)

Please contact office.leitgeb@lrz.uni-muenchen.de for the password.

Lena Kästner (Saarland): Modelling Mental Illnesses: Multiplexes to Rescue?

Understanding mental illnesses requires looking at a variety of different factors contributing to the development, persistence, and treatment of mental illness. That is to say, scientists must take into account the role of, e.g., behavioral, psychological, neurophysiological, genetic, pharmacological and environmental influences on psychopathology. To integrate real-world data regarding such varied factors, complex models have been raising high hopes. Among them are so-called multiplex models. In this talk, I shall examine the vices and virtues of such models and compare them to other approaches.

Jürgen Landes (MCMP): Drug Approval in the Real World

The Evidence Based Medicine approach to causal medical inference is the dominant account among medical methodologists. Competing approaches originating in the philosophy of medicine seek to challenge this account. In order to see how successful these challenges are, we need to assess the performance of all approaches in real world medical inference. One important real world problem all approaches could be applied to is the assessment of drugs for approval by drug regulation agencies. This paper assesses the success of the Status Quo against an empirical non-systematically obtained body of evidence and we scrutinise the alternative approaches from the armchair. We tentatively conclude that the Status Quo is often not successful at its primary task and suggest this is due to factors relevant to the “messy real world”. However, while all alternatives hold promise, they are at least as susceptible to the real world issues that beset the Status Quo. We also make recommendations for changes to current drug approval procedures, identify lacunae to fill in the alternatives, and finally, call for a continuation of the development of alternative approaches to causal medical inference and recommendations for changes to current drug approval procedures.