Biological Psychiatry Sketched—past, Present, and Future

It is a difficult task to capture the history of biological psychiatry in a brief essay. Let me frame this modest effort in a timeless humanistic perspective. Psychiatry is the study and treatment of troubled mental lives. Its ultimate goal is to heal broken spirits. At its core, it is an attempt to better understand human thoughts and emotions and to allow this understanding to inform the healing arts. Despite our modern scientific hubris, we know rather little about how brains truly construct our minds and passions. Partly, this is because few scholars have come to terms with the need to understand the evolutionary neural dynamics that affective experiences are ultimately made of. It is all too easy to accept emotions as primitive “givens” and proceed toward a superficial understanding based on words, arbitrary definitions, and the quiddities of logic rather than biology. But the greater and more significant