When Leanne Williams tells her Stanford Medicine colleagues outside psychiatry that her field has no data-based markers to diagnose what's wrong with a patient, she watches their jaws drop in disbelief. It's like walking in with an ankle injury and having a doctor skip the X-ray, deciding whether it's sprained or broken based solely on how you feel. That shocking gap is exactly what Williams, the inaugural Vincent V.C. Woo Professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, aims to close.
Williams has just been chosen to lead the Commission on Precision Mental Health, an international task force that will fundamentally reshape how anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia are diagnosed, treated, and measured. Developed in partnership with Nature Mental Health, the commission launched with a commentary published May 18, co-authored by Williams alongside clinical assistant professor Lara Foland-Ross and Max Wintermark, chair of radiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. The focus is unmistakable: imaging brain circuit function and using those findings to guide diagnosis and intervention.
The core mission is to "redefine mental disorders through brain circuit function analysis, promoting stratified, circuit-informed care that enhances treatment accuracy and efficiency." It's an approach that mirrors decades of progress in cardiovascular and cancer medicine—moving beyond trial-and-error toward targeted, measurable care. The goal isn't to replace clinical expertise or psychological assessment, but to anchor them in objective data about how the brain actually functions.
As Williams emphasizes, this represents a stunning blind spot in modern medicine. "Measurable circuits of brain function provide the organizing architecture for mental illness and for guiding precision mental health care," she and her co-authors wrote. "It would be unacceptable in any other medical discipline not to start the diagnosis process with imaging of the affected organ. The brain is an essential starting place for these conditions."
The stakes are staggering. Depression alone affects more than 280 million people globally and is the leading cause of years lived with disability worldwide, with an economic burden exceeding $1 trillion annually. The current system—relying on patient self-reporting to make both diagnostic and treatment decisions—doesn't just fail patients; it wastes time when every day matters. Williams herself carries this truth personally: she lost her partner to suicide, a loss rooted in untreated depression.
Williams founded the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health to advance this work, and she will speak at the American Psychiatric Association conference about both the commission's goals and the imaging advances her team has made. The shift she's championing mirrors how cardiovascular medicine learned to look inside the organ at risk, or how Alzheimer's researchers now scan the brain to identify who's truly at risk.
What makes this moment different is that the science is finally catching up to the need. Brain imaging technology has matured. The research establishing the link between circuit dysfunction and mental illness is solid. The infrastructure exists to implement change. What's required now is the collective will to move psychiatry beyond the last century's approach—and Williams, leading this international commission, is positioned to help deliver that shift.