Psychiatric genetic research (PGR) holds great promise for preventing, understanding, and treating neuropsychiatric disorders - a source of immense societal burden and personal suffering. Such research poses many ethical challenges, and failure to perform systematic study of the ethical issues surrounding PGR may threaten societal acceptance of this important scientific work. To date, NIH has not funded any work on PGR that focuses on collecting empirical data about ethical issues.

The prevailing model for ethical review of multicenter clinical trials is a distributed system of reviews conducted by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of each institution engaged in the conduct of the trial. Conducting multiple reviews of a single protocol can delay the commencement of multicenter research and delay patient access to potentially beneficial treatments.

Advances in psychiatric genetics are likely to offer major diagnostic and therapeutic benefits, but also legal and social-related risks, to individuals who were diagnosed with, or have a proclivity for, psychiatric disorders. In response, courts and policy-makers will have to ensure that psychiatric genetic data are used to promote, and not to obstruct, equality, justice, and social inclusion.