You go to see a psychiatrist a decade from now. Alongside the usual questions about how you're feeling, your work and your relationships, they look at biometric data from your phone about your sleep and speech patterns, examine the results of a blood test or a brain scan and even check your postcode to see whether your neighbourhood has high levels of pollution. An algorithm then compares that information with data from thousands of other people, determines which types of treatment have worked best for people similar to you and uses its findings to suggest a treatment regime. That's a vision of the future called precision psychiatry. And it's a world away from most people's experiences today. For all the progress that has been made across the medical sciences, psychiatry remains a frustratingly imprecise discipline. Doctors use someone's symptoms and clinical history to make a diagnosis and prescribe treatments. But mental-health diagnoses are broad and can be vague ' a particular...
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