Fumbling in the Dark1

In the spring of 2013, Thomas Insel, medical director of the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), announced that all grant funding by this, the most important and prestigious mental health research center in the country, would be limited to studies attempting to elucidate the biological basis of mental illness-NIMH was not going to fund any research having to do with the mind or the environmental context of mental activity. The announcement (Belluck & Carey, 2013) was unequivocal: Insel “said in an interview…that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics, and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms,” as they are defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

This announcement was surprising because, in a very real way, the search for biological underpinnings of mental illness had been a complete and utter failure after decades of effort and billions of dollars of expense. In a recent article in the New York Times: (Carey, 2014) devoted to Dr. Insel, he says as much himself: “the previous generation of biological research in psychiatry has been largely a disappointment, both in advancing basic science and in improving lives.”

In the article, it is claimed that the “overall impact of this drug revolution on public health has been mixed,” but that could be understood as a euphemism; in fact, there are no biological markers for the overwhelming majority of mental illnesses as a result of the current biological research. No genetic explanations for any of the diseases in the DSM came out of the unraveling of the human genome in the 1990s. No linking of the etiology of a mental disorder and the clinical effects of a biological therapy have been found, such as exists for insulin and diabetes or penicillin and pneumonia.

Of course, psychopharmacology is everywhere, and it has had a positive impact on the reduction of emotional sufferin