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Research on amphetamine-induced psychosis helped inspire the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia.

The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia cemented the idea that antipsychotics are disease-specific treatment.

The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia remains influential despite not having been proven.

The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia led to a reductive view of mental illness and over-reliance on drugs.

Justin Garson’s new book The Madness Pill has been interpreted in different ways. In a review in the Wall Street Journal, psychiatrist Sally Salal describes it as a story of the scientific heroes who ushered psychiatry into the modern era by discovering the biological basis of schizophrenia.

To me, it is the story of brilliant minds being side-tracked by an enticing solution to a complex problem that, as the saying goes, was "clear, simple and wrong." That solution is the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia—the idea that schizophrenia is caused by a brain abnormality—too much, or in some versions, also too little dopamine. The brilliant minds are Sol Snyder, the psychiatrist who wrote the first definitive articulation of the theory in the 1970s, and his mentors and associates.

The dopamine theory of schizophrenia holds psychiatry in sway much like the serotonin theory of depression did for decades. Although there is little evidence of anything awry in the dopamine system of people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia before they are placed on dopamine-modifying drugs, few psychiatrists are prepared to challenge the theory. Its modern proponents weave ever more complex and elaborate versions of it.

The Madness Pill frames the scientific narrative with the story of Garson’s father and his psychotic........

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