Precision psychiatry: promise for the future or rehash of a fossilised foundation?
Psychological Medicine July 1, 2021 Annemarie C J Köhne, Jim van Os
Precision psychiatry promises to improve psychiatric practice by grounding diagnosis and treatment in biological markers, but a conceptual analysis of its foundations reveals they are obsolete and flawed. Mental suffering cannot be reduced to biological essences, because biological processes alone cannot capture qualia, meaning, or abnormality without context. Despite its intentions, precision psychiatry does not offer a sufficiently promising alternative to current phenotype-based classification systems.