Personomics

Precision Psychiatry Done Right

Bibliographic Data

ID8397688
AuthorsAxel Constant (0000-0002-1547-8803, corresponding author)
Year2024
Publication date2024-02-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-0882 • E-ISSN: 1464-3537
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/729750
OpenAlexW4391424852
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited41

There is doubt over the possibility of a precision psychiatry. Mental disorders are complex multilevel entities that can hardly be reduced to lower-level processes functioning as the site of mechanistic biomarkers. Mechanistic biomarkers are used as treatment targets and for the stratification of patient populations, the search for such biomarkers being characteristic of precision medicine. The doubt over the possibility of a precision psychiatry rests on the assumption that such a psychiatry would have to adopt a reductionist, or “vertical” approach to mental disorders, by searching for the “deepest” possible “omics” level of description – the level of biomarkers – accounting for the highest possible manifestation of the disorder. Precision medicine is a reductionist endeavour, and so would have to be a precision psychiatry. In this paper, I argue that this assumption is unwarranted. I argue that the fear of reductionism of precision psychiatry comes from a limited understanding of the notion of mechanisms and causality in multilevel systems; one that assumes that mechanistic explanations should account for the strong, or Humean causality between processes at hierarchically differentiated levels of mechanism. Adopting the view of mechanistically mediated effects and the interventionist model of causation in psychiatry, I show how one can envisage a bona fide, yet non-reductionist precision psychiatry program. Such a program would be engaged in the search for causal, mechanistic markers found “horizontally” within levels of mechanism, at each level of mechanism, including the level of the “person”. This program would be a “personomics” program. A precision psychiatry done right is one that allows not only for traditional omics, but also for personomics

Psychiatry · Computer Science · Medicine · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Mental Health Research Topics · Personality Disorders and Psychopathology · Psychology

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