I think the fundamental question that you raise is the, which is unanswerable is to the people who suffer from these manias and these psychosis. What do they want? And of course, which they are talking about the ones that are manic or the ones where they're not manic. We as a community, as a society, as a nation should be thinking about those hard questions. I know people with lived experience of mental illness who have a lot to say about how they would like to be treated. They've been so marginalized as population in this community it never occurred to experts to actually talk to them about what sorts of modalities they might actually find to be healing.
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.