Snake Phobias, Moodiness and a Battle in Psychiatry

This was in today's New York Times:

Psychiatrists have been searching for more than a century for some biological marker for mental disease, to little avail. Although there is promising work in genetics and brain imaging, researchers are not likely to have anything resembling a blood test for a mental illness soon, leaving them with what they have always had: observations of behavior, and patients' answers to questions about how they feel and how severe their condition is.

No matter how many times I have asserted the above fact, I always have some joker who wants to argue that mental illness has long been proved to be biological, it has not.

The above quote appears in an article that discusses the debate within psychiatry on what defines "mental illness". Many psychiatrists realize that they sound like a bunch of self-serving bozos when they claim that such a large percentage of the population is mentally ill. Few lay people believe them. That is because we lay people are smarter than we look ...

Psychiatrists know that some in their ranks even want to define such things as common low-grade shyness as a biological disease - I assume these are the folks on the pharm company payrolls in one way or another since the proper treatment for these types of ailments is always medication. For biological psychiatrists there is no point in using talk therapy to help a shy person because "you can't talk to a disease".

That's why this particular article is misleading. It tells the story of a person whose career was nearly ruined by anxiety attacks as an example of how serious a mild mental condition can be. However it implies that the person was treated through talk therapy. I think that due to the destructive "biology only" trend that has overtaken the profession, it is far more likely that a person like that would be given medication and sent on their way.