What Have We Learned About Mental Illnesses Over the Last 150 Years?

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The medicalization of everyday suffering versus perhaps, which we've been talking about the pharmaceuticals. And I think it is something that is an important role for psychiatrists to sort of trying to suss out and distinguish these different things. It's a completely different question is does the mental health system as it's currently constructed help those people who have been described as having extreme psychological distress?

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.