Introduction and overview

In recent years, mental health professionals have become increasingly aware of the importance of genetic factors in the etiology (causes) of mental disorders. Since the Human Genome Project began its mapping of the entire sequence of human DNA in 1990, the implications of its findings for psychiatric diagnosisand treatment have accumulated rapidly. A new subspecialty known as biological psychiatry (also called physiological psychology or psychiatric genetics) has emerged from the discoveries of the last two decades. Biological psychiatry got its start in the late 1980s, when several research groups identified genes associated with manic depression and schizophreniarespectively. These studies...