The Use of Magnetoencephalography in Psychiatry

Abstract

In the 1950s, as EEG became widely available, psychiatrists hoped that at last a tool had been found which would give them insight into those cerebral processes which underpin mental illness. Apart from major neurological units, EEG machines were placed mainly in psychiatric hospitals. There was a directive in the UK which advocated the purchasing and training of personnel in EEG technology for all prisons. That was a time of great optimism; not only would this new technology help with the eradication of mental illness, but also with the eradication of crime by the insights that it would give into brain function. Our prisons came to be more like hospitals. Disillusion set in over the next decade. By the end of the 1960s neurologists were claiming that EEG was no more than a toy. A stethoscope on the wall outside a football match was the current phrase, trying to establish how the players were placed on the field. Had it not been for the absence of neuroimaging and the advent of evoked potentials, particularly visual evoked potentials, and their relationship to the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, EEG might have remained simply a research tool.