The Mind's Biology

Doctors are reaching past the symptoms of mental illness to fix the circuits that breed them.

Neuroscience’s inroads have emboldened a small but growing number of clinicians and researchers to reject diagnostic protocols on which mental health practitioners have relied for years — the cataloguing of symptoms such as sadness, fatigue, loss of appetite — and instead focus on finding biological clues associated with these symptoms in a blood test, a brain image or a saliva sample.