Mental illnesses typically emerge during childhood or adolescence and often persist into adulthood. To characterize the mechanisms responsible for debilitating psychiatric diseases, we must elucidate genetic, biologic, and environmental risk factors that underlie these complex disorders. Large-scale population-based studies that use quantitative measures of brain and behavior are crucial for bridging the divide between molecular biology and disease phenomenology. Linking disease phenotypes with intermediate variables that span several levels of biological analysis will help clarify how these variables contribute to the development of brain systems that underlie complex behavior and mental illness.

精神疾病通常在儿童或青少年时期出现，并经常持续到成年。为了表征造成精神疾病的机制，我们必须阐明构成这些复杂疾病的遗传，生物学和环境风险因素。大规模的基于人群的研究，使用大脑和行为的定量测量方法，对于弥合分子生物学与疾病现象学之间的鸿沟至关重要。将疾病表型与跨越多个生物学分析水平的中间变量联系起来，将有助于阐明这些变量如何促进构成复杂行为和精神疾病的大脑系统的发育。