Professor Eduard Vieta, new academician of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Catalonia
Eduard Vieta, professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and the Institute of Neurosciences (UBneuro) of the University of Barcelona, has been appointed new elect academician of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Catalonia (RAMC). The ceremony took place on Sunday 20 October, in an extraordinary public session at the headquarters of the RAMC in which Professor Vieta read the speech “From classical psychopathology to precision psychiatry”. The numerary member Josep Tabernero responded to the academic speech.
Eduard Vieta, professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and the Institute of Neurosciences (UBneuro) of the University of Barcelona, has been appointed new elect academician of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Catalonia (RAMC). The ceremony took place on Sunday 20 October, in an extraordinary public session at the headquarters of the RAMC in which Professor Vieta read the speech “From classical psychopathology to precision psychiatry”. The numerary member Josep Tabernero responded to the academic speech.
Eduard Vieta is a professor at the Department of Medicine at the UB, head of the Psychiatry and Psychology Service at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona and of the research group on bipolar and depressive disorders at the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS). He was the scientific director of the Mental Health Networking Biomedical Research Centre. (CIBERSAM) until 2022, and is a world leader in the study of the causes and pharmacological and psychological treatments of bipolar disorder and depression. He has also promoted good clinical practices, knowledge and the destigmatization of mental disorders. In 2023, he was one of the awardees of the 10th Distinction of the UB’s Doctors’ Senate and the UB Board of Trustees for the best scientific and humanistic dissemination activities, in honour of his work to promote the dissemination of scientific knowledge in society as a whole.
In his speech, Vieta said: “I am fortunate to be a first-hand witness to the evolution of psychiatry in the past thirty years”. He added that he has gone “from a psychiatry based on experience and on highly ideological roots, with a lot of subjectivity, to a medical speciality that strives to reach the same standards as others, despite the obvious difficulty posed by the complexity of the target organ, the brain, and the necessary ethical barriers in certain types of experimentation”.
On his training in psychiatry, he recalled that “at that time, I had already come to the conclusion that by far the pathology I found most attractive was bipolar disorder. Patients with bipolar disorder were fascinating: they had intense lives, and they could go from absolute joy to deep misery, and, if you got the treatment right, they recovered and became normal people again. Unbelievable”. “Maybe it was fate, — he added — but I think I ended up being the first ‘bipolar specialist’ in Spain, and possibly in Europe”.
On precision psychiatry, Vieta stressed that “it aims to indicate the most appropriate treatment for a mental illness based on objective biomarkers, unlike traditional psychiatry, which was based on observed, and therefore subjective, psychopathology”. He also recalled that “the process of specialization in psychiatry is unstoppable, in the face of exponential growth in knowledge. It is no longer possible to be an expert in schizophrenia, anorexia, autism, gambling addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, to give an example”.
Josep Tabernero recalled that, “thanks to our friend Eduard, many of us passed the Psychiatry course, and in many cases, with excellent marks”. He related the discipline with research in the world of cancer, and said that “I firmly believe that the parallels between current oncology and the moment in which psychiatry is living are evident and exciting times and we can gather it in some of the words that Eduard has used to define current and future psychiatry: innovative, preventive, participatory (patients and their families must have the leading role in the decision-making process) and efficient”.