Psychiatry is a branch of medicine. However, given the complexity of the brain, advances in psychiatry are driven by developments in multiple disciplines. As the discipline that can revolutionize psychiatry, neuroscience, its major discoveries, although not immediately apparent in the practice of psychiatry, if its rapid progress is ignored, psychiatry will face a situation of closed academic research and obsolete academic knowledge. At the same time, research in psychology and cultural anthropology has contributed to the development of psychiatry. In this article, the main advances in 2012 will be presented in three areas related to psychiatry: neuroscience, clinical psychiatry, and public mental health.