Why Are There No Biological Tests in Psychiatry?

[Warpy]

7. Psychiatry is what one goes into after a full medical education

so there's plenty of biology and chemistry involved.

The DSM is a fairly primitive tool to classify illness by blocks of symptoms in order to point one toward the best possible treatment out of the few we now have.

One of the places I worked consistently (I was a generalist who worked all specialties) was a neuropsychiatry unit, where insults to the brain had resulted in various cognitive and behavioral problems. Psychiatrists in training were clustered there.

Understanding brain structure and chemistry is still in its infancy, thanks in part to the persistence of Freud's theories but mostly because we simply didn't have the wherewithal to measure things like neurotransmitters.