Psychiatric outcomes for serious mental disorders continue to disappoint. Large studies published between 2003 and 2007 show less than one third of patients classified with major depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia achieved satisfactory outcomes [1-3]. These studies were supervised by psychiatric experts and represent best psychiatric practice.

The director of the U.S National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH], Thomas Insel, M.D., stated “…these trials used evidence-based treatments of well-documented efficacy that were administered with optimum clinical standards. The results show the significant limitations of current pharmacological interventions.”

These unsatisfactory results from state of the art psychiatry are indeed troubling, because it means that many people with mental disorders will continue to live in misery. A likely explanation for this crisis is that the traditional treatment approach doesn’t directly address the individual physiology underlying these disorders.

Many medications are available and effective for some people across the array of mental disorders. Since the goal of medical treatment is to improve individual physiology, a psychiatric medical treatment should improve individual neurophysiology. The main obstacle to achieving this goal has been the absence of objective measures to guide medication selection that is likely to be effective for each person.

Mismatches between a prescribed medication and individual neurophysiology explain the current crisis in psychiatry and call for objective approaches which conform to the medical model.