Psychiatry’s foremost challenge is that its symptom-based classification has insufficient predictive value for clinical outcomes. Precision psychiatry attempts to improve treatment response by searching for predictive biomarkers, which should be described in the context of the neurobiology of illness to help facilitate the development of new treatments.

This primer for clinicians aims to outline the problems that precision psychiatry faces, how computational methods can overcome them and how these methods can be used in clinical practice. Clinicians have an important role in translating this research and incorporating computationally-derived transdiagnostic biomarkers in clinical trials opening the possibility for personalised therapies.