Problems with Traditional Strategies in Mental Health Research

Abstract

When we consider the prodigious efforts that have been made to understand the etiology of the variety of psychiatric and social deviance that humans exhibit, it can prove depressing for a researcher to assess the yield. Some have responded to this apparent lack of progress by searching for mystical sources of understanding or for magical, often poetic, treatments. Others have responded with nihilistic humor. One observer has characterized the growing mountain of writings on the etiology of mental illness as having produced an “independent problem of waste disposal.” J. N. Morris (1975, p. 218), the English epidemiologist, has rather dryly commented on schizophrenia research: “Up to now, unhappily, this activity has yielded few new facts; a deficiency somewhat obscured by the communicativeness of psychiatrists and social scientists.”