Biological psychiatry or biopsychiatry aims to investigate determinants of mental disorders devising remedial measures of a primarily somatic[clarification needed] nature.
This has been criticized by Alvin Pam for being a "stilted, unidimensional, and mechanistic world-view", so that subsequent "research in psychiatry has been geared toward discovering which aberrant genetic or neurophysiological factors underlie and cause social deviance".
[1] According to Pam, the "blame the body" approach, which typically offers medication for mental distress, shifts the focus from disturbed behavior in the family to putative biochemical imbalances.
Biopsychiatric research has produced reproducible abnormalities of brain structure and function, as well as a strong genetic component for a number of psychiatric disorders (although the latter has been shown to be correlative rather than causative).
Research already has elucidated some of the mechanisms of action of medications that are effective for depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, attention deficit, and cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.
In 1970, The Nobel Prize was awarded to Julius Axelrod, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health, for his discovery of how anti-depressant medications regulate the availability of neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine in the synapses, or gaps, between nerve cells.Researchers have proposed that most common psychiatric and drug abuse disorders can be traced to a small number of dimensions of genetic risk[3] and reports show significant associations between specific genomic regions and psychiatric disorders.
[6][7] For example, one reported finding suggests that in persons diagnosed with schizophrenia as well as in their relatives with chronic psychiatric illnesses, the gene that encodes phosphodiesterase 4B (PDE4B) is disrupted by a balanced translocation.
[8] The reasons for the relative lack of genetic understanding is that the links between genes and mental states defined as abnormal appear highly complex, involve extensive environmental influences, and can be mediated in numerous different ways, for example, by personality, temperament, or life events.
The proven effectiveness of antidepressant, mood-stabilizing, and antipsychotic medications has helped sensitize the public to the reality of mental illness and taught them that treatment works[citation needed].
Conflicts arising from this disparity raise natural concerns in this regard including:[17] Nevertheless, Sharfstein acknowledged that without pharmaceutical companies developing and producing modern medicines - virtually every medical specialty would have few (if any) treatments for the patients that they care for.