Precision Medicine in Psychiatric Disorders

Abstract

While mental disorder causes great suffering and psychosocial burdens, its diagnosis, and treatment, unlike in other medical specialties, is based on a subjective evaluation of symptoms and trial-and-error medication choices. As a consequence, the implementation of precision psychiatry significantly lags behind precision approaches in other fields. The current chapter focuses on special characteristics of psychiatric disorders including their heterogeneity, multifactorial background, the problems of finding and relying on peripheral biomarkers instead of sampling the brain, and the special case of psychotherapeutic treatment. It explains the need for precise predictive models for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment and overviews the needs and current state of clinical implementation in the case of affective and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Finally, the chapter also mentions several potential obstacles in the way of precision psychiatry which are related to the nature of psychiatric disorders.