In an interview with the Scientific American, Stanford psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Amit Etkin, comments on the “wrong path” that psychiatry has taken as a field and his hopes for the future. “A report that came out recently in Health Affairs showed that spending within our health system in the U.S. is greater for mental illness than for any other area of medicine, and yet our understanding of these illnesses is incredibly backwards. Treatments are no different than they were 40 years ago, so that feels like a problem that is only getting bigger without an obvious solution,” Etkin writes. “The long and short of it is that people have named syndromes or disorders that they don’t actually know represent a valid entity that is distinct from another entity.”
