Psychiatric researchers would pinpoint the biochemical causes of illness and neatly design drugs to target them, but it is now clear that the simple biomedical approach to serious psychiatric illnesses has failed.
Schizophrenia now appears to be a complex outcome of many unrelated causes — the genes you inherit, but also whether your mother fell ill during her pregnancy, whether you got beaten up as a child or were stressed as an adolescent, even how much sun your skin has seen. It’s not just about the brain. It’s not just about genes.