Well, I did it. I posted links to the special issue of Psychophysiology on the elusive RDoC [RDoC…], and I read some of the articles. I only get what they’re aiming at doing, but I’m left with no personal understanding of how this will get them there. There are things that I know I’ll never understand, and this is one of them – like the others in my little collage. There were snatches along the way that made sense and seemed like productive avenues, but then I was lost at sea once again. At times I thought, "No wonder Insel went to Google," at other times "promising." Also, I was looking for some explanation for what he meant when he said:
"Five years ago, the NIMH launched a big project to transform diagnosis. But did we have the analytical firepower to do that? No. If anybody has it, companies like IBM, Apple or Google do – those kinds of high-powered tech engines…"
I haven’t a real idea of what he was talking about, how a high tech engine might be used at this point. They take a shot at that in the last article [the Data-Web], but it wasn’t altogether clear what they were collecting for their ‘big data’. Most of what I read seemed like think-tank talk to me at this point. But I’ve done my due diligence now. I wish them luck and am moving on. I sure didn’t find anything that suggested that the RDoC has reached a point where it deserves to be a basis for future NIMH Grants. To borrow a line from a friend, like the DSM-III that preceded it, the RDoC isn’t ready for prime time. That’s about all I can say with any confidence…
Talk about cut and run… Insel and his undistinguished lieutenants dreamed up RDoC – a pure case of armchair schematics – then they imposed it on the field at large because, well, they control a lot of funding, and now Insel hikes to Google leaving everybody to clean up the mess. I had my say against RDoC here. The main legacy of RDoC will be to set back research, probably more even than DSM-III did. We don’t need Insel’s top-down style of science management.