MEDIA
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White House Executive Order Advances
Mental Health Innovation
May 18, 2026
This Comment announces the Precision Mental Health Commission and its initiative to redefine mental disorders through brain circuit function analysis, promoting stratified, circuit-informed care that enhances treatment accuracy and efficiency. The approach mirrors advances in cardiovascular and cancer research, moving beyond trial and error toward personalized care.
As the global burden of mental illness continues to grow, the limitations of a trial-and-error approach to treatment have become increasingly clear. Mental health care is entering a new era: in contrast to the previous reliance on symptom-based averages, advances in measuring brain circuit function now enable prospectively stratified, circuit-informed care that identifies biologically grounded subtypes and guides the selection of more targeted treatments — including pharmacological, psychotherapeutic and neuromodulatory approaches. Partnering with Nature Mental Health, the Precision Mental Health Commission has been convened to bring an interdisciplinary approach to translating these advances in imaging and clinical neuroscience into an actionable plan for transforming mental health care.
Harnessing brain imaging to shift the
mental health paradigm
May 18, 2026
Stanford Medicine Professor Leanne Williams talks about her work leveraging a data-driven approach to enhance the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric conditions.
Williams was chosen to lead the Commission on Precision Mental Health, an international task force that will attempt to redefine and streamline the way conditions such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia are diagnosed, treated, and measured. A major focal point: imaging brain circuit function – and using those findings to guide diagnosis and intervention.
The commission is being developed in partnership with Nature Mental Health, which published a launch commentary May 18 from Wiliams and collaborators Lara Foland-Ross, PhD, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and Max Wintermark, MD, chair of radiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
The commission’s core objective: “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 advances in cardiovascular and cancer research, moving beyond trial-and-error toward targeted care. The goal is not to replace clinical expertise or psychological assessment, but to complement them with objective measures of brain function.
Williams will speak at the American Psychiatric Association conference about the goals of the commission – and about the advances her team at Stanford Medicine has made, with imaging in particular. “Measurable circuits of brain function provide the organizing architecture for mental illness and for guiding precision mental health care,” Williams and her co-authors wrote.
As she emphasizes when she’s talking to stunned colleagues: “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 with these conditions.”