1 Forthcoming in Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry III, Oxford University Press (Chapter 11) Varieties of social constructionism and the problem of progress in psychiatry Kenneth F. Schaffner and Kathryn Tabb 11.1 Introduction There is a growing consensus among psychiatrists and philosophers of psychiatry that the failures of the discipline to establish etiological explanations of mental disorder are due to the enormous diversity of causal pathways leading to the syndromes characterized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Particularly problematic for accounts based on neurological mechanisms is the interplay of genes and environment affecting that biological pathway diversity (Sullivan et al. 2012). Despite early optimism that behavioral genetics would ultimately validate psychiatrists’ taxonomies, recent findings from genome-wide association studies indicate that even the very signs and symptoms of mental disorder may have thousands of different genes affecting them (Goldstein 2009). Furthermore, even when there is evidence of the implication of certain genes in psychopathology, the character the disorder takes in each individual case is likely the result of personal experience. It is time to take seriously the