We searched PubMed using the keywords “psychiatry” and “genetic testing,” limiting our results to English-language publications for a ten-year period through November 2010. This yielded 912 articles. Although many articles were not material to this review, some of these publications identified other relevant studies, which were added to our sample. We used the titles and abstracts to identify quantitative (n=17) and qualitative (n=6) empirical research articles focusing on attitudes and beliefs regarding genetic testing in psychiatric disorders. The study designs are summarized in Tables 1 and 2. We did not include articles discussing the technical aspects of genetic research or articles updating readers on genetic tests that are currently available. In addition, although psychiatrists often participate in treating neuropsychiatric conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease, the many ways in which these disorders differ from traditional psychiatric disorders (e.g., average age of onset, course, and outcome), as well as their extensive consideration elsewhere in the medical literature, led us to exclude them from our systematic review; however, reference is made below to some of these studies for illustrative purposes. When statistical tests were reported by the original authors, the results are noted in the text below.
