The current state of psychiatry is like a world in which antibiotics were discovered before the germ theory of disease. Imagine you go to a doctor and he diagno

The current state of psychiatry is like a world in which antibiotics were discovered before the germ theory of disease. Imagine you go to a doctor and he diagnoses you as having pneumonia. That's the best he can do, a symptom-based diagnosis. He tells you to take penicillin for seven days, and to go see him again after 14 days, to see if the medication is working, or if you'll have to switch to amoxicillin. If this hypothetical doctor knew what caused infections, he could test for specific strains and choose the best medication without this trial and error phase. He would also know that pneumonia and skin infection, two apparently completely unrelated diseases, may in some cases be caused by the same bacteria and treated with the same medicine. Does it mean he should stop prescribing antibiotics until he knows exactly how they work? Of course not. Those are saving lives, and there are clinical trials to prove it. What it does mean is that researchers should work on discovering the underlying mechanisms, because the payoff would be absolutely tremendous. Assuming, as you said, that they exist.