The United States government recently announced its new director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Joshua Gordon. If you think that’s just bureaucracy as usual, think again. Mental health research, under the leadership of the previous director, Dr. Thomas Insel, underwent a quiet crisis, one with worrisome implications for the treatment of mental health. I hope Dr. Gordon will resolve it.

For decades, the National Institute of Mental Health provided crucial funding for American clinical research to determine how well psychotherapies worked as treatments (on their own as well as when combined with medications). This research produced empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy, interpersonal psychotherapy and other talking treatments.

But over the past 13 years, Dr. Insel increasingly shifted the institute’s focus to neuroscience, strangling its clinical research budget. Dr. Insel wasn’t wrong to be enthusiastic about the possibilities of neuroscientific research. Compared with the psychiatric diagnoses listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (D.S.M.), which can be vague and flawed, brain-based research holds out the promise of a precise and truly scientific understanding of mental illness.

Psychiatric diagnoses depend on clusters of signs and symptoms. For major depression, for example, some criteria are low mood; wanting to die; and sleep, appetite and energy changes. These diagnoses lack the specificity of the biological markers that neuroscience seeks to identify. If we could find a genetic, neuroimaging or brain-circuit explanation for a mental illness, it might even yield a cure, rather than just the treatment of what can be recurrent, chronic conditions.