ABSTRACT

Psychiatric genetics has become ‘Big Biology’ precisely because the clinical and genetic heterogeneity of psychiatric disorders are resistant to revolutionary discoveries. Taking a ‘styles’ approach to the history of psychiatric genetics introduces one kind of epistemological ‘handbrake’ on narratives of revolution. The birth of psychiatric genetics in Germany marked the point at which a science of heredity crossed the ‘threshold of scientificity’ – an event that coincided with new standards of testing the truth and falsity of Mendelian patterns of segregation. From the 1920s to the 1970s, during which a statistical style of reasoning prevailed, psychiatric genetics was dogged by controversy and criticism. Moderate critics were constructive, seeking to retain but also improve the central methodology, while radical critics denounced the whole research programme as being the product of determinist ideology. Psychiatric genetics has assembled a domain of tractability by harnessing networks and resources around a predominantly statistical style of scientific reasoning.