I think your insight is profound. I feel the same way about about the tragedy of mass shootings. We have a conversation about drug about gun control that's very formulaic. It does not ask what to me is the real question, which is not how do we keep guns out of the hands of people while maintaining our first and second amendment rights? You could argue it's very similar by the way to the pharmaceutical point for me. Whether we understand brain chemistry or not we understand that some pharmaceuticals can help some people. Similarly, whatever causes mass shootings, we could debate whether gun control of various kind could mitigate the consequences of these events.
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.