There is a desperate desire to treat mental illness like physical illness. We have not been able to link any measured chemical imbalance with the disorders we're trying to treat. The hope was that this would also happen here. And I am, you know, part of the reason that drove me into psychiatry originally was the hope for a biological test.
When psychiatrist Marco Ramos of Yale University prescribes antidepressants to patients in distress and they ask him how they work, Ramos admits: We don't really know. And too often, they don't work at all. Despite decades of brain research and billions of dollars spent, psychiatry has made little progress in understanding mental illness. Listen as Ramos explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts how the myth of the biological basis for mental illness began, why it stubbornly persists, and why honesty about what we know and don't know is the best policy.