A FAILED SYSTEM –

Feb. 22, 2022 – Dr. Insel, 70, who left N.I.M.H. in 2015, calls the advances in neuroscience of the last 20 years “spectacular” — but in the very first pages of his new book, he says that, for the most part, they haven’t yet benefited patients.  

His book, “Healing: Our Path From Mental Illness to Mental Health,” is not an indictment of the science to which he devoted much of his adult life. Instead, it chronicles failures in virtually every other element of our mental health system, including the ineffective delivery of care, the gutting of community health services and the reliance on police and jails for crisis services.

It also calls out a paradox: that the United States, a country that leads the world in spending on medical research, also stands out for its dismal outcomes in people with mental illnesses. Indeed, over the last three decades, even as the government invested billions of dollars in better understanding the brain, by some measures, those outcomes have deteriorated.

The country’s long spell without breakthrough treatments can be attributed, in part, to the complexity of the brain.

Dr. Insel rose through the ranks at a time of optimism that advances in neurobiology would lead to new treatments, and as head of N.I.M.H., as he put it, he “bet big on genomics.” But 20 years later, he said the role that genes play in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder has proven to be extraordinarily complex.

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