Psyrin and the Future of Vocal Biomarkers in Psychiatry

"I Can Hear It In Your Voice" was a good title, but it has worse SEO

Since 2013, when I was carpooling with Dr. Leonardo Lopez to my general psychiatry residency training program at the Zucker Hillside Hospital in a too-long drive from Brooklyn to Outer Queens, I have been fixated on the possibility of ahypothetical psychiatric diagnosis. I wanted to understand what was wrong with the people I was caring for without the conceptual anchor of a—frankly—made-up diagnosis in a book that is an approximately $25m/year source of revenue for its publisher. The DSM-5 is a product of a committee, or, rather, a series of committees, and reads like it. To suss out what is wrong with a patient, we rely on the pattern recognition skills of physicians, which are not very different from the rest of medicine. However, I longed for a better way. Leo had been a neurologist prior to his training as a psychiatrist. He also lived in Brooklyn and liked to tell it to me straight: “The way you get good at psychiatry is by taking your interests outside the field and brin…