In organizing the WPA section on personalized psychiatry, a few thoughts came to mind. In our daily clinical work, we think like personalized psychiatrists/psychotherapists, and even more generally, we think in a personalized way. We have different experiences in a field, for example, we see many patients, we read books, we discuss with colleagues and we consequently create models. We create models for everything: patients, politics, cooking, education and so on. Personal experiences shape our models and we use these models in our daily activities.

This is good because we do not waste time analyzing everything in detail and we can use our experiences of success and failure to accelerate decisions. We listen to our “somatic marker”, the physical sensation that tells us whether something is good or bad.

The great risk of this approach is that, as the models become stronger with experience, we believe that they represent the truth and we slowly and subtly only consider experiences that confirm our models and somehow reject those that do not (it's not really the same, it's different, there should be a mistake, etc.): In this way, our big ego and the transformation of experiential models into beliefs will cause us to lose critical thinking.

Science, as a "candle in the dark" (Carl Sagan), keeps our minds open to change and helps us to disprove our models, which improves the possibility of developing new models that are closer to reality. Scientific methodology and research allows us to test ideas and models, helps us to develop critical thinking and makes us all humble and reminds us that we are not gods.

We need to think like a scientist and to achieve this goal we need to become scientists. Only when we do scientific research and engage in research activities do we fully realize the role of science in our incessant learning process and the weakness of our cognitive ability to create models.

In psychiatry, the brain and mind are the biggest puzzle that science is trying to unravel. The gap between our experience as psychiatrists and what science is able to explain is still large, so many of us choose to follow their models and abandon efforts to constantly update them, convinced that research is only able to understand a standard model of patients that is far removed from real patients and therefore unable to capture their complexity, the complexity of a human being. Unfortunately, this is often the case.

Personalized medicine has made it possible to search for specific cancer drugs for specific patients with a unique genetic background, which has allowed an incredible improvement in clinical responses. The same path could be followed by personalized medicine in psychiatry. There are no more “mean” patients, no more standardized patients, but each person with a mental disorder is looked at taking into account their genetics, their experiences as a child, their temperament, their psychophysiology, their cognitive style and other personal characteristics to build and understand each person in their personal life. The promise of personalized psychiatry/psychotherapy is to build a science that unravels individual complexity to figure out the best personal therapy for each patient and help us become better personalized psychiatrists/psychotherapists. All this goes beyond the personal models and opinions that we, the psychiatrists/psychotherapists, use.