There is a sense of excitement and change occurring in mainstream medicine.President Obama, in his State of the Union address on January 30, 2015, announced a national Precision Medicine Initiative (The White House 2015).More recently, the United Kingdom's government innovation agency started a Precision Medicine Catapult designed to enhance the development of precision medicine in the UK (Precision Medicine Catapult 2015).Precision medicine is defined by the National Research Council as ''the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient'' (National Research Council (US) Committee on A Framework for Developing a New Taxonomy of Disease 2011).This builds on an increasing interest in personalized medicine and, indeed, the terms ''precision medicine'' and ''personalized medicine'' are sometimes used interchangeably (Avitabile 2015).Common to both is an emphasis on tailoring treatment to individual needs and, increasingly, on the role of technology to support that goal (Carney 2014;Sacchi et al. 2015).Although much of the focus of medicine to date has been on biomarkers and genetics (McCarty et al. 2011), the concept is not limited to those factors.Just as critical, but less widely elaborated, are psychosocial variables that also fit under the umbrella of precision and personalized medicine.Increasing discussion has also focused on the relevance of precision medicine to mental health.Thomas Insel, a former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), has argued that the basic tenets of precision medicine are reflected in the NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project, ''which aims to develop more precise diagnostic categories based on biological, psychological, and socio-cultural variables'' (Insel 2015).He adds that ''…precision medicine for mental disorders will not come from a single genomic glitch.Rather, like many other areas of medicine, many genes each contribute only a small amount of vulnerability as part of an overall risk profile that includes life experiences, neurodevelopment, and social and cultural factors.RDoC assumes that we will need many kinds of data to reach precision, more like triangulating to find your position on a map.These data will draw from many sources, including symptoms, genotype, physiology, cognitive assessment, family dynamics, environmental exposures, and cultural background.''The NIMH's emphasis on including a wide variety of assessment data in the pursuit of precision recognizes that mental health must move beyond genetic factors as the sole focus of RDoC-facilitated precision.
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