Is Schizophrenia a Genetic Disease?

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I don't want to romanticize mental illness which there's a strong cultural thread that does. I'm not against biological breakthroughs by any means by any means, but I am interested in the question of what constitutes a breakthrough even with these somewhat recent still tentative advances. There was a hope for a while that we would just find a gene associated with a particular condition right that would be very clean. That is not panned out in terms of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. And at some point, we need to stop just waiting for this sort of biological Godot.

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.