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.
It's an interesting topic, and an endless rabbit hole once you start engaging with it. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was 19. At the time (this was in the mid to late 90s) the biological interpretation of mental disorders had virtually universal acceptance in the public health system; the idea that I might benefit from forms of treatment other than a cocktail of antipsychotics was dismissed whenever I tried to raise it (on more than one occasion my questioning their value was treated as merely another symptom of psychosis). The turning point for me only came when, after three years, I was transferred out of the clinic and into the lap of a specialist who also had an interest in anthropology.