Light in the Dark

Photograph for TIME by Robert Young

Double trouble "Your brain pays a price for the violent cycling—it's scarred by it," says Malhi (right), with Lagopoulos

Many people would feel a lot better about psychiatry were there definitive tests for its catalog of disorders. For now, its practitioners make judgments on the basis of checklists and observation — solid methodology as far as it goes, but not the same as, say, a blood test for anaemia or an x-ray of a broken femur. In the search for a test offering this kind of diagnostic certainty in mental illness, two Australian researchers believe they've made a leap. Gin Malhi and Jim Lagopoulos, from the department of psychological medicine at Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital, report detecting what appear...

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