The ‘Nation’s Psychiatrist’ Takes Stock, With Frustration

^{Official photo of Thomas Insel from the NIMH Office of the Director}

A new book by Dr. Thomas P. Insel, who for 13 years ran the United States’ foremost mental health research institution, begins with a sort of confession.

During his tenure as the “nation’s psychiatrist,” he helped allocate $20 billion in federal funds and sharply shifted the focus of the National Institute of Mental Health away from behavioral research and toward neuroscience and genetics.

“I should have been able to help us bend the curves for death and disability,” Dr. Insel writes. “But I didn’t.”

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...