There are dozens, but this is one of the most clear and to the point, and is found in one of the most mainstream, orthodox, and hard-to-get-published-by journals in mental health:
Weinberger DR, Radulescu E. Finding the elusive psychiatric “lesion” with 21st-century neuroanatomy: a note of caution. Am J Psychiatry. 2016;173(1):27-33.
The situation is about as bad as it can be: there are so many potential sources of confounding in MRI studies that they simply cannot be trusted to say anything about the basic cellular elements of brain tissue in either healthy or diseased patients. All they can validly talk about is themselves; in other words "rather than referring to differences as evidence of brain structural abnormalities, they should be called differences on MRI measurements."
This is without getting into other hugely problematic aspects of MRI studies in mental health: tiny samples; failure to replicate; and most interesting to me, the fact that experimental subjects (i.e. the people in the study "with ADHD" or schizophrenia or whatever) are not screened for psychiatric medication use, which, because medications can shrink brain tissue, can make it look like the condition is affecting brain structure when in fact the drug is. (So another source of confounding, then.)
maybelsyrup|2 years ago
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.1941
The citation is:
Weinberger, D. R., & Radulescu, E. (2020). Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging All Over Again. JAMA Psychiatry. DOI:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.1941
The article is a follow-up editorial on an older (2016), more substantive critique of MRI methods in psychiatry, which is also worth digesting slowly:
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2015.1...
The citation is:
Weinberger DR, Radulescu E. Finding the elusive psychiatric “lesion” with 21st-century neuroanatomy: a note of caution. Am J Psychiatry. 2016;173(1):27-33.
The situation is about as bad as it can be: there are so many potential sources of confounding in MRI studies that they simply cannot be trusted to say anything about the basic cellular elements of brain tissue in either healthy or diseased patients. All they can validly talk about is themselves; in other words "rather than referring to differences as evidence of brain structural abnormalities, they should be called differences on MRI measurements."
This is without getting into other hugely problematic aspects of MRI studies in mental health: tiny samples; failure to replicate; and most interesting to me, the fact that experimental subjects (i.e. the people in the study "with ADHD" or schizophrenia or whatever) are not screened for psychiatric medication use, which, because medications can shrink brain tissue, can make it look like the condition is affecting brain structure when in fact the drug is. (So another source of confounding, then.)