Experts: No known biological cause of mental disorders (USA Today)

NIMH Director and others critics in the field admit there is no known biological cause of mental disorders, and that further research on “biomarkers” and away from DSM symptoms is now necessary:

The focus on biomarkers and away from symptoms got attention just weeks ago when a blog post by Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said the DSM is “at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each” and that “its weakness is its lack of validity.” He says NIMH will reorient its research away from the manual because “DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.”

“The whole disease model that underlies the DSM has been an utter scientific failure,” says Stuart Kirk, a professor emeritus of social welfare at UCLA, who has been tracking DSM for decades. “There’s not a single biological marker for any of the 300-plus disorders. What we do instead is descriptive. This describing is creating a disorder and pretending it’s a medical illness rather than just human behavior.” Kirk is co-author of Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs, out last month.

Psychiatrist Michael Taylor, of Ann Arbor, Mich., author of Hippocrates Cried: The Decline of American Psychiatry, out last month, says psychiatry has to go back to the medical model for disease. “The reason why so many of the syndromes don’t work out when they do field trials is that they don’t exist in biological reality,” he says. “They only exist in the DSM.”