GWAS efforts have been subject to multiple criticisms, both for the method generally and with respect to psychiatric disorders. Criticism has been welcomed, particularly those that are based on empirical data and not opinion. One initial criticism – that GWAS will not work in the sense of identifying any replicable associations – has been robustly disproved as GWAS clearly “works” for a broad range of biomedical disorders. The crucial question for our field is whether GWAS will “work” for psychiatric disorders (as discussed above, there is positive evidence that it has). Common criticisms of GWAS are listed below. All have been articulated at length and strong counter-arguments to each have been articulate (see Table 1 for citations).
