I'd compare and contrast the state of the field to something like how modern molecular biology can produce an unambiguous diagnosis of drug-resistant tuberculosis in a patient and prescribe an effective course of treatment, relative to diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia.
There's no unambiguous physical test for schizophrenia that I've ever heard of, it's just things like patients having auditory hallucinations and so on. There's no known mechanistic pathway (i.e. there's no known defective proteins that the genes express that somehow mess up the auditory pathway in the brain causing such hallucinations). It really sounds more like a mis-wiring-of-neurons type of thing that develops over time in the person, due to external pressures that they're unable to cope with.
Now with infectious disease, there is a great mystery still - out of a thousand people exposed to the same level of the same pathogen, some get sick and some don't. Some of this is explained by previous immunological exposure, but a lot isn't. Some of it is probably genetic in that one's in-born complement of immunological genes likely results in increased resistance or sensitivity to viral and bacterial proteins used to target cells.
What I'd guess here is that people just don't want to admit that mental illness is more of a social problem than a biological one, due to things like mass homelessness (which could cause schizophrenic breaks), poor parenting (which parents would rather blame on 'bad genes' rather than their own personal failures), etc. Of course, the same can be said of the prevalence of infectious disease due to poor public health regimes, contaminated food supplies, etc.
There's no unambiguous physical test for schizophrenia that I've ever heard of, it's just things like patients having auditory hallucinations and so on. There's no known mechanistic pathway (i.e. there's no known defective proteins that the genes express that somehow mess up the auditory pathway in the brain causing such hallucinations). It really sounds more like a mis-wiring-of-neurons type of thing that develops over time in the person, due to external pressures that they're unable to cope with.
Now with infectious disease, there is a great mystery still - out of a thousand people exposed to the same level of the same pathogen, some get sick and some don't. Some of this is explained by previous immunological exposure, but a lot isn't. Some of it is probably genetic in that one's in-born complement of immunological genes likely results in increased resistance or sensitivity to viral and bacterial proteins used to target cells.
What I'd guess here is that people just don't want to admit that mental illness is more of a social problem than a biological one, due to things like mass homelessness (which could cause schizophrenic breaks), poor parenting (which parents would rather blame on 'bad genes' rather than their own personal failures), etc. Of course, the same can be said of the prevalence of infectious disease due to poor public health regimes, contaminated food supplies, etc.