

Identification of risk loci with effects on five psychiatric disorders - carbocation
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)62129-1/fulltext

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lutusp
A quote: "These results provide evidence relevant to the goal of moving beyond
descriptive syndromes in psychiatry, and towards a nosology informed by
disease cause."

Translation: "Psychologists and psychiatrists can't either identify or treat
the majority of 'mental' illnesses -- for that, we need to locate the actual
causes, most of which are genetic."

NIMH director Thomas Insel made the same point in his 2010 Scientific American
article "Faulty Circuits":

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-
circ...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits)

A quote: "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean
something about the underlying cause of a patient’s illness before figuring
out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to
mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was
detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely “mental,”
and psychological therapies followed suit.

Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics
are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new
approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."

More detail here: <http://arachnoid.com/building_science>

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carbocation
> Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and
> genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories,
> yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses.

Yes, I agree.

My general sense is that when we start to figure out the basis for psychiatric
diseases, those get moved into neurology's domain.

I was looking at a psychiatry textbook and I was surprised to see Rett
syndrome (a pervasive developmental disorder) listed as a psychiatric disease.
It turns out that the textbook was quite old, and it wasn't up to date with
the latest information about this disorder, whose cause is now known ( _MECP2_
mutations, mostly).

