Drug Discovery
Newer and better medications are obtained as part of the drug discovery process, which occurs mainly in the pharmaceutical industry. This process is hampered by excessive attention to marketing demands, as opposed to scientific exploration. It also is impaired by the psychiatric profession’s mistaken ideologies, whether psychoanalytic orthodoxy in the past or DSM beliefs of the present. Wrong clinical phenotypes impair finding new pharmacological mechanisms and targeting them well to the write clinical indications. Perhaps as a consequence, no treatments have been developed in the last few decades, since DSM-III, that are more effective than prior agents. Progress for the future in drug discovery will require not just better neurobiological work, but also a new approach to clinical diagnoses in psychiatry.