Researchers are constantly hunting for chemical variations in people with emotional/behavioral problems. But even if chemical differences are someday found in those with such problems, why would we assume that these chemical processes cause their abnormal behaviors or moods, as opposed to being mere correlates of them at the chemical level? Doesn’t every mood, thought, and behavior, whether normal or abnormal, have to have its own unique corresponding chemical correlate? After all, we are made of nothing but chemicals. Every feeling, thought, or behavior is merely a series of chemical processes. Such processes are the physiology, or means by which all bodily functions occur. Pathophysiology is the study of changes in the way bodies work, as a result of disease. These changes are the effects, not the causes, of diseases.
Despite this, biological psychiatrists claim that finding the necessarily-present underlying chemical processes of abnormal moods, thoughts, or behaviors will prove that they are chemically caused. They are confusing how with why, or physiology with etiology. But its chemical correlate does not cause it; it merely is the mood, thought, or action, as viewed at the chemical level. They are one and the same thing. The chemical imbalance theory, in proposing that something causes itself to occur, thus makes no sense. It would be like finding the speeding up of water molecules to be the mechanism of water boiling, and then deducing that this process is the cause of its boiling. It is actually heat that makes water boil, by causing its molecules to accelerate.
For example, if we get upset over losing someone, of course some chemical (neurotransmitter) process must occur, which corresponds to our feeling upset — this process is our upset feeling, as seen at the chemical level. But the cause of the emotion cannot be itself (its correlating chemical brain activity) — the cause is our loss. Similarly, if I choose to raise my arm, this elicits chemical processes in my muscles involving calcium, acetylcholine, and proteins. These processes are the means by which the arm movement operates, not its cause. They are the movement, as viewed at the chemical level. My voluntarily raising my arm is what made it move. Or if someone hits you on the head, this can cause impaired cognitive functioning, by altering brain cell levels of chemicals like potassium, glucose, and calcium, disrupting brain cell functioning. But this correlating change in chemical activity is not the cause of the impaired cognition; it is the impaired cognition, as seen at the chemical level. It is how, not why, the cognitive impairment occurred. The why, or cause of the abnormal cognition, and its correlating abnormal chemical activity, was being hit on the head.
Imagine if police stopped looking for killers whenever they found the chemical correlates of an injury, due to wrongly assuming that the chemical abnormalities occurred spontaneously, killing the person. They would deduce that “The case has now been solved; it was biochemical.” Such illogical conclusions would lead to a big rise in the murder rate once potential murderers realized they will not be sought after or arrested. Similarly, people’s acceptance of the chemical correlates of problems to be their causes prevents them from looking for and addressing their true causes.
Others claim that finding unusual brain activity in those with emotional/behavioral issues would explain what caused their problem. But abnormal brain activity and abnormal mental functioning are just two different ways of viewing the same event. Brain activity is the mechanism by which all thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, as seen at the brain cell functioning level. Of course something correspondingly occurs in our brains every time we think, feel, or act. And of course, each unique thought, feeling or action, whether normal or unusual, must have its own correlating unique brain process. They are the same thing, and something can’t cause itself to occur. So even if such necessarily-present brain activity correlates are someday found in people with emotional problems, this won’t explain why their problems developed. It will merely be a way to view how their brains work (what the physiological mechanisms of their feelings, thoughts, or actions are).
For example, as a result of years of training, neurosurgeons learn vast amounts of knowledge, concepts, and expertise, which all must have corresponding unique brain processes. These brain processes did not cause their concepts, knowledge, and expertise to develop (the neurosurgeons’ educations did), but merely are these, as seen at the microscopic brain activity level. Similarly, as children mature normally and learn effective coping tools like focusing or managing their moods and impulses, of course there will be brain-activity changes which correspond to their mature coping tools, since these newly learned mental functions must have new brain-activity correlates. If children do not mature normally and are thus labelled ‘ADHD’ or ‘bipolar,’ then of course their brain activity will differ from the mature child’s brain activity. But the reason why they did not mature would remain unanswered.
So what do studies of the physiology of people with emotional/behavioral problems have to do with finding the causes of their problems? Absolutely nothing. They serve no purpose, just as uncovering the physiology of people who need new cars or new shoes won’t help them solve their problems either. All they accomplish is to fool clients into thinking that they have fixed defects and thus cannot help themselves. They thereby dissuade people from exploring the true causes of issues that they need to work on. Neglected issues worsen over time, so ‘biological causation of mental illness’ is a lie which itself causes mental illness. Psychiatry’s tricking people into not using their amazing capacity to learn and adapt is its greatest harm. As more and more problems become psychiatry’s domain, more and more people are being lured into handing over responsibility for their or their kids’ issues to a field whose goal is not to help them, but to produce lifelong psychiatric clients. These people thereby unwittingly let their or their kids’ initially minor, transient, resolvable troubles blossom into major, chronic, disabling ones.
I agree that causation cannot be inferred from correlational data. However, causation can be inferred from manipulated variable research. Some people (those with HCV and melanoma) have been treated with IFN-alpha. In response, depression/anxiety occurs in 20-60%. Others have injected LPS, component of bacterial cell wall, into human subjects under the skin (Stone et al., 2007; Eisenberger et al. 2010, 2009; Inagaki et al., 2012). In response people report sadness and anxiety. They are less responsive in the Nucleus Accumbens to reward, and they exhibit more amygdala activity when viewing angry faces. Seems to me the case for inflammation being able to cause depression in some people is pretty good.
Report comment
Thanks for this post.
Jill, I see you as substituting 1 reductionistic, decontextualized theory for another. It still begs the central question; what causes the inflammation/chemical imbalance?
Report comment
glad you asked. Stress of various types can induce inflammation. (There are many studies manipulating the variable of stress and then measuring inflammation.) Diet can alter gut microbiota such that leaky gut occurs and systematic inflammation ensues. The good news is that treatments should be directed toward reducing inflammation. For this, diet, exercise, social support, yoga, enhancing vagal tone have also demonstrated efficacy.
Report comment
I agree Jill. Stress and poor diet certainly contributed to my anxiety and depression. Another factor for me was Vitamin D deficiency. After increasing my intake of Vitamin D from 1000 IU per day to 8000 IU per day I noticed I was much less angry, although not necessarily less sad. Life is still difficult and it is hard to be happy when bad things are happening, but since increasing my vitamin D supplement I feel much more able to cope with sadness.
Report comment
Deprivation of resource is inversely related to otherwise insulated or allayed fears – so whatever level, the lack of support for function brings dysfunctional relationships and accompanying triggered strategies that tend to exacerbate and compound the ‘problem’ which is not caused by the conditions that exposed or triggered it – but those conditions are embodiments of the core power struggle set in archetype as our human conditioning. One who chooses to relinquish what others cling to may ascribe different meanings to their experience and get different results.
But psychic-emotional conflict is deeply conditioning our consciousness and relational society. So much so that the human condition has dropped the ‘ing’.
There is a chicken/egg to negative habit patterns – so creating conditions of calmer or clearer sense of being can serve better choices and better outcomes. My key point would be that a core sense of worth is the context in which all else works – for without it there is no soil for anything true to grow. No one can change what they are not at least momentarily the owning of. I don’t advocate ‘positive’ overlay upon a fear-defined sense of self but an honesty as to the fear opens a truly positive or integrative perspective from which to take this step.
Report comment
Hi, Jill,
I agree it is likely that SOME depression/anxiety is caused by nutritional problems or inflammation from stress. Is that the cause of ALL depression/anxiety? And might not “treating” the resulting inflammation from stress provide an excuse for society not addressing the many causes of avoidable chronic stress in our modern society?
— Steve
Report comment
“I WANT IT THUS!” or in reverse expression “I WANT IT OTHERWISE!”
and when I do not get what I want I experience a sense of disappointment, deprivation, denial, depression or anxiety, anger or loss of face and am exposed in shame.
How much do I set myself up to suffer by insisting fulfilment comes in the terms I set? Or set up a sense of grievance as a sense of inverted joy in seeking vengeance?
In many respects we become flexible in controlling our expressions or in wanting less and abnegating the call to joy as a cause of trouble – for love is weakness and vulnerability to hurt – and so hide, guard and withhold by joining in the open conspiracy to look away from and limit the call to joy by taking joy in substitute distractions and gratifications.
The wish to shut down or keep a thick skin aligns the habits and diet and companioning that supports the wish.
The avoidance of transformation is a clinging to patterns of thought and behaviour that focus on the need for everything (and everyone) ELSE to change – especially after a token sacrifice does not get the required payback.
But the generally managed surface behaviours are only the lid of a jack in the box of often ‘unconscious’ stuff that essentially wants to come home. Everything we push down or try to eradicate holds a part of us homeless. What goes around, comes around.
But yes ‘treating symptoms’ instead of addressing cause is the evasion of cause – and the transformation that comes from seeing what is actually going on in my mind. It may still make sense to do whatever we may to boost or strengthen the Life force – under whatever name – such that stresses are able to be experienced through to positive outcomes and inflammations cleared or damage cleared up to support cellular and metabolic health in whole bodyminded being.
It isn’t stress that damages so much as stress in context of negative self-defeating outcomes. There’s a context that makes all the difference. We are not intrinsically weak. We have learned to hide or deny the capacity to live in full presence as part of our human adaptation.
Everyone has their pathway and for some nutrition opens doors that for others it does not. Living our own by extending the same freedom to others. No need to make rules as to what anyone should do. Better to illuminate the choices and consequences and trust people to move in the direction of their healing as they are currently able to accept.
Report comment
Aren’t sadness and anxiety normal, unavoidable human emotions, rather than diseases? Doesn’t everyone experience losses, failures, rejections, or disappointments, to varying degree, at times? And life is not stress-free for anyone – don’t we all have things that we worry about? Aren’t we all anxious about death? Only those who cope with sadness or anxiety by going to psychiatrists to get diagnosed/medicated, as opposed to the many other coping tools available, are officially considered to “have” depression or anxiety. But these same feelings are what motivate people to cope in ways other than psychiatric treatment, be they creative outlets, sports, humor, religion, reading, music, entertainment, shopping, internet surfing, etc.
Report comment
Hi Jill: You say that causation can be inferred from manipulated variable research. However, this is not what happens in natural settings. If you look at the comment I posted earlier, you will see that it is HUMAN EXPERIENCE (psychological causes) that brings about changes in neurons and neuro-chemicals. Brains do not change for no apparent reason at all – that is what the psychiatrists want us to believe.
If someone loses one’s job, all the rumination/worry/regrets will change their brain chemicals and when the person gets a job again, these chemicals will return to normal again.
Report comment
A blow to the head, even before inflammation sets in, can cause symptoms of depression. Psychiatrists aren’t looking at the blow to the head, or even the inflammation, as causes of depression. They are looking, mainly in the brain, for the neurotransmission and circuitry malfunctions that result from insults and injuries. That’s what the search for the cause of depression amounts to these days.
Chemistry is where the money is. Drug companies are chemical manufacturers, after all.
Report comment
maybe until we find out the causes of mental illnesses….
we should do more talking and less drugging our patients…
15 minutes and an antidepressant is not going to do it…
Report comment
You’ve got that right!
Report comment
If someone cries, the tears didn’t cause the problem.
Two short books I wrote on the subject of mental ‘illness’ (they are free and similar to this article):
– Is Psychology Science? https://www.tromsite.com/2015/04/is-psychology-science/
– The problem with mental illness.https://www.tromsite.com/2015/06/the-problem-with-mental-illnesses/
Report comment
I admire you for moving to the practice of psychotherapy and I agree with your motion.
I completely rejected the biological approach in 1980 – unsuccessfully. And consumed strong psychiatric medications until 1984.
When I stopped the strong psychiatric drugs I noticed I was becoming overwhelmed with anxiety. But at the same time it was demonstrated to me that when I was able to get away from my anxious preoccupation I could see things in more reasonable ways. So I learned to avoid my compulsive Anxiety until I calmed down – which was very difficult to do at the time (but worked).
I’ve learnt a lot more since about Psychotherapy, Spirituality, Meditation, Buddhism, Mindfulness, 12 Step Fellowship, Exercise and everything else. But the only “Mental Illness” Biology worth knowing for me was that psychotropic drugs alter the brain and it’s function and that ts important to come off them very carefully.
And that Psychotherapy does work.
Report comment
In response to Jill: The question is whether there is such a thing as “mental illness”. Thus, even if inflammation is correlated with depression in some people this does not prove that those affected are mentally ill. On the contrary, we have good reasons to believe that their depression is a response to a physical condition, and not the result of a diseased brain. Moreover, psychological life-events, such as trauma and loss, are in most cases much more plausible explanations for depression than inflammation. Finally, I find it ethically dubious to inject LPS (a poisonous substance) into human subjects in order to study whether they become depressed and anxious.
Report comment
I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Kelmenson’s thesis. The overwhelming majority of published research now simply takes for granted that discovering biological differences between healthy vs diagnosed persons demonstrates the physiological cause of the disorder. A recently published study (1) presents evidence of “reductions” in white matter integrity (essentially, impaired structural physiology of brain cells) in a large sample of persons with self-reported episodes of depression, compared to healthy persons. The authors argue that loss of white matter integrity “could reflect the neurological basis of” major depressive disorder and “may underlie impaired emotional process and cognitive abilities in” people who are depressed. The authors notably did not report whether or not participants had ever taken medication, and relied on self-reports of depression. No assessment of life events or circumstances were included in the study. This problem, as Bob Whitaker and Peter Gøtzsche and Gary Greenberg, etc., have so convincingly explained, is rooted in the power of the pharmaceutical industry and the control it has exerted over research funding, academic promotion, tenure and salaries and, consequently, public acceptance of the disease model of psychological disorders. Perhaps the current opioid/heroin crisis will help change public opinion.
(1) Shen et al. (2017). Subcortical volume and white matter integrity abnormalities in major depressive disorder: Findings from UK Biobank imaging data. Scientific Reports, 7, 5547.
Report comment
Once I stopped “medication” and moved away from Psychiatry with non drug support, I no longer cost the taxpayer anything – and this in my opinion would be the desired result.
Report comment
I can substantiate 30 years of wellness as a result of not taking my medication. But the Research University that managed the Psychiatric Unit where I was treated is still looking for biological Cures. While the patients remain either biologically lobotomised or dead.
Below is a Research Paper from the Research University from 1978. In 1986 the author was President of The British Association of Psychopharmacologists.
“Neurochemical effects of fluphenazine decanoate in socially-reared and isolated young rats”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2044042/
And more recently
“Monitoring and documentation of side effects from depot antipsychotic medication:”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22070791
Report comment
I am glad that you brought up the heroin epidemic. I believe that psychiatry’s “creation” of ADHD led to the heroin epidemic. Here is the evidence: Age 7 is the mean age of initial ADHD diagnosis, and ADHD labelling took off in 1990. The first batch of ADHD-labelled kids thus turned 23, which is the mean age of heroin users, in 2006. This is precisely when heroin overdosing took off. Six times as many stimulants were prescribed in 2000 as in 1991, and six times as many people overdosed on heroin in 2015 as in 2006 (15 years later). 19% of white children, but only 10% of black and 4% of hispanic children, are diagnosed with ADHD, while the ratio of white to black to hispanic drug overdoses is a nearly identical 19 to 10 to 6. Furthermore, the overdosing ratio among ethnicities was basically equal before ADHD diagnosing became a “thing” in 1990. Next, the ratio of male to female heroin overdosers was 3 to 1 in 2006, at which time the ratio of male to female ADHD-labelled teens was also 3 to 1. But now the ratio of male to female overdosers and male to female ADHD-labelled teens are both 2.2 to 1. This is no surprise, given the fact that amphetamines are the drugs most abused by teenagers. They have become America’s latest gateway-to-heroin drug, thanks to psychiatry. Finally, the top four nations where ADHD is diagnosed the most, are also the nations with the highest drug overdose rates, in the same order, while the states where ADHD is diagnosed the most are the highest drug overdosing states. These are all per-capita rates.
Report comment
Holy cow, that’s astounding. Thanks, Lawrence. I’ll be using this information in my classes this Fall. Chris B.
Report comment
The other problem with this kind of research is that it only establishes probability. Some people with less white matter are not depressed, and some people with more white matter are. Unless EVERY depressed person presents with reduced white matter, there is no possibility of even a high correlational link, let alone a causal one. It’s really an idiotic conclusion to draw when 80-90% of your sample overlaps with “normal.”
Report comment
@Holger
Good example – they conflate a here-and-now description at the neurological level with the multifactorial etiological proces leading up to the here and now. It is unfortunately the norm. As I see it the reductive biological approach to mental health, which sees causality as solely bottom-up, lacks understanding of contextualized development. It still refers to environment though – only it is reduced to the umbrella-term ‘stress’ – which relates it to a second rate position.
Although there are definitely power-structures behind this type of ‘flat thinking’ there are also, IMHO, intellectual reasons behind it. We humans are not very adept at understanding complexity and presented with cognitive shortcuts, such as simple linear models, we too readily accept them: “There’s A here, so that explains B there!” The biopsychosocial model is an attempt at grasping dynamic complexity better, but unfortunately it lacks specificity and influence.
Another type of important reason could be the rise of the computer metaphor. A computer does not react to subtleties in the environment as long as it gets power. If you grab a picture of the program a faulty computer is presently running, you can correct its program directly too. Its history or relational embeddedness is not central to its local operation. It’s sad the computer has become the main metaphor for the brain. It would be better to consider the nervous system as more akin to a plant than a computer. In this regard biological psychiatry is strangely un-biological.
Just as mental health is not determined by single one-factor causality, neither – I think – is the unfolding of psychiatry solely related to the pharmaceutical industry.
Report comment
On your last point, I agree. I just didn’t want to make my post lengthier. There are a lot of guilty parties. Gary Greenberg’s books and videos (on youtube) provide excellent descriptions of the events over the past 100+ years that led APA to the fix it’s in now. I think there are too many people making too much money to expect psychiatry to turn the ship around on its own. Peter Gøtzsche is convinced psychiatry if far too corrupt to fix itself. I think only class-action lawsuits or serious government regulation changes can turn the tide.
Report comment
I agree. Until people begin going to prison for the wrongs that are done in this area nothing is going to change at all.
Report comment
Stephen,
I agree with you.
Psychiatry itself has moved into criminality – it’s very strange that as part of our culture we turn a blind eye to it.
Report comment
Is it possible that a drugged population can coexist with a thriving economy? I think America is a great example of a success story there.
People want to maximize utility, and while they might not want a certain pill for $10, they might want it for $5. While drug companies enjoy massive returns to scale, selling more pills more cheaply than ever before to consumers, it’s hard to identify negative and even positive external factors of so many people taking pills.
Report comment
The conclusion of this article makes sense, because it is true that psychiatry is tricking people. But the premise requires more thorough examination:
“After all, we are made of nothing but chemicals. Every feeling, thought, or behavior is merely a series of chemical processes.”
This is precisely the kind of reductionist thinking that allowed psychiatry to flourish in the first place. If every feeling, thought, or behavior is merely a series of chemical processes then there is no way to defend the logic of this piece because logic is nothing more than the product of a series of chemical processes. Modern materialism and reductionism have caused a great amount of confusion, and psychiatry has capitalized on this confusion. The remedy is to study the ancients, or to discover the truth concerning the soul. Modern medicine, neuroscience, and biology simply cannot answer the questions that truly matter.
https://psychiatricsurvivors.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/the-truth-about-psychiatry/
Report comment
I agree. It is only an assumption that we are all chemicals and nothing more. Lots of cultural traditions, indeed almost every cultural tradition, posits that we are more than that. The concept that we are only material is a PHILOSOPHICAL assumption, not a scientific fact. The mind is a mystery that science has not even begun to unravel in the slightest degree.
That being said, the author recognizes that “we” (the entity possessing the mind in charge of the body) can cause things to happen, and that biochemical changes are the response. That’s the most important starting point, regardless of what we believe “mind” to be or how we believe it to be generated. The latter question is one of metaphysics, and I doubt hard science will ever be able to find a concrete answer to it.
Report comment
Since alleged mental illnesses are actually syndromes, I’d doubt that our pharmaceutically oriented mind scientists would find any consistent evidence of their subjects’ illnesses, because they’re mistakenly dealing with heterogeneous groups in their search for the magic curative pills that will leave their sponsors even more rich than they presently are.
Unfortunately, their approach also leads to ignoring real illnesses that seriously affect mental functioning, such as ignoring ADHD symptomology that could likely be induced by subclinical heavy metal poisoning, even though discovering and treating such things isn’t difficult (but likely won’t use any of the sponsor’s products).
Report comment
hey doctor kelmenson….this is a very good question you are presenting…a good discussion so far….I wonder how you are defining mental illness…do we really know much about causes…we did have to know something about biology when we found out the cause of pellagra…it played havoc to the brain..
Report comment
In psychiatry, we have always ruled out physical causes before assuming a client’s problem is “mental”, since by definition, psychiatrists have always dealt with non-physical problems. Emotional/behavioral problems are reactions to life events and underlying psychological issues which everyone experiences, such as anxieties about one’s future, insecurities, internal conflict, loss of loved ones, relationship troubles, challenging stages of life that create overwhelming pressures, etc. I try to understand each client’s individual life story – what their particular issues are. I do not try to fit my clients into mental illness diagnoses. These were arbitrarily devised in 1980, by a team of psychiatrists who were saddled with the difficult task of trying to fit the endlessly wide variety of possible emotional/behavioral problems into a finite number of scientific-sounding disorders. At that time, the field of psychiatry was near extinction, due to there being no more state hospital jobs as these all closed down, and due to heavy competition for self-pay psychotherapy clients from skyrocketing numbers of social workers and psychologists who were also doing therapy. Psychiatry was also a subject of much ridicule and criticism in the 1970s, for being non-scientific and at times inhumane. So the 1980 DSM needed to come up with these diagnostic categories, in order to make it seem that psychiatrists practiced real, respectable medicine – that they “treated” serious, legitimate conditions, which insurance companies could be billed for. It worked, so psychiatry was saved. This was not done for the benefit of clients.
Report comment
dr kelmenson—I thought psychiatry was supposed to be a discipline right between neurology and psychology…are you defining psychiatry now as a psychology discipline….I think psychiatry should stay in the middle….I don’t think we know the cause of schizophrenia….
Report comment
I don’t theorize about schizophrenia, since it has been around for centuries, and only comprises a tiny percentage of psychiatric patients. I focus on modern “mental illness” epidemics, which I believe are the result of psychiatry’s medical model tricking and luring people into thinking emotional/behavioral problems are caused by neurological disease. For example, when a young child’s normal innate wildness/immaturity is viewed as a brain disease (ADHD), parents/schools thereafter drastically lower challenges, expectations, demands, and disciplining, and replace these with daily “tranquilizer darts”, coddling accommodations, and helicopter parenting, due to wrongly thinking that the child can’t learn effective coping tools because of his/her “defective brain hard-wiring”. This altered upbringing may seem to help at first (by covering over the problem). But it ultimately prevents rather than promotes the kid’s maturing into a responsible, functional, independent adult. The final product is what is now called “chronic ADHD” or “bipolar disorder”. It wastes the child’s life, and is an example of what happens when biological psychiatry sticks its nose into an area it has no business in, and declares it to be a “medically treatable brain disease” when it is not.
Report comment
Dear Dr Kelemenson,
Fair play to you!
“Schizophrenia” is rated as a disability more serious than being blind or in a wheel chair.
The cause of “schizophrenia” as we know it, (in my opinion) is the same as any other drug induced medical condition. But there are solutions.
When I came off treatment “suitable” for “Schizophrenia” – my big problem was FEAR.
If I hadn’t learnt how to deal with my Fear, I would have had to return to the Psychiatric System. Learning to deal with “it”, meant moving to Long Term Consistent Wellness.
I would estimate “Schizophrenia” to be well within the pale of Full Psychotherepeutic Recovery. The most practical inexpensive assistance was the best for me.
Report comment
Lawrence
Good blog. I believe it is is important to add to your point about all human thoughts, feelings and behaviors being expressed in some type of neuro-chemical fashion.
The important addition I would make is that these expressions would all take on an individual character from each and every different person. In other words, there would be no one neuro-chemical expression for all forms of depression, anxiety etc. This is just another reason to discount, deconstruct, and dismantle Biological Psychiatry’s efforts to impose a Medical Model on human behavior, thoughts and feelings etc.
Lawrence, psychiatry is a scientifically fraudulent and oppressive institution that does enormous harm in the world. While you are helping to deconstruct their Medical Model with this blog, why is it that you do not, therefore, call for psychiatry (as a medical specialty) to abolished?
Respectfully, Richard
Report comment
Richard:
Thank you for adding your logical point. As far as trying to abolish biological psychiatry, you and I are working on that now, through what we are doing here on this website. I do think that there were some truth-seeking, helpful psychiatrists who made huge contributions to society before the 1980s, such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Menninger, and Thomas Szasz. I hope there are at least a few psychiatrists still out there who, like me, respect and make use of their teachings.
Lawrence
Report comment
Lawrence
Thanks for the response. I completely agree that there are some psychiatrists who have helped people in the past, and today, there is a small minority who do very positive things in exposing the truth and helping people.
However, I definitely would not include Freud on the positive side of history. While some of his concepts and theories regarding the “unconscious” have some merit, it is also true that he was very much a political coward who put his career aspirations far above the search for the truth.
And his fatal decision (early in his career) to deny the objective truth of the numerous examples of sexual abuse disclosed by many of his female patients, and then instead develop a theory claiming they were instead some form of sexual fantasies, has overall done enormous harm (primarily to women) over many decades.
It is very clear that Freud’s decision was a cowardly response to the early derisive responses from his colleagues regarding his reporting of high rates of sexual abuse.
And finally, Lawrence, just because there is a tiny minority of mainly older psychiatrists who do (or have done) some positive things, begs the question as to whether or not psychiatry should be abolished.
Psychiatrists who want to do therapy can call themselves psychologists or therapists. Those who want to study and treat the brain (or other neurological problems) can call themselves neurologists.
To allow the continuation of a medical specialty that alleges to treat mind “maladies” or “diseases,” is to sustain and promote the myth of “mental illness” and the continuation of the Medical Model which does enormous harm in the world.
It is very important for politically and scientifically conscious psychiatrists to take a moral and just stand that their own profession needs to be abolished. This will hasten the historical demise of all forms of psychiatric abuse.
Richard
Report comment
Lawrence
I was disappointed that you chose to not respond to my critique of Freud and to the political importance of the most conscious and advanced thinking psychiatrists calling for their own profession to be abolished.
This type of stance by psychiatrists would NOT mean that they would suddenly need to abandon their credentials and stop functioning as a psychiatrists in the world. On the contrary, there would be an enormous amount of work they could be doing to counter all forms of psychiatric abuse and the Medical Model.
For example, these politically conscious psychiatrists could raise hell by challenging Biological Psychiatry in every gathering and meeting of organized psychiatry on the planet.
They could also organize a cadre of psychiatrists that would study the science of psychiatric drug withdrawal and launch efforts to provide medically credentialed support to the millions of people trying to get off of these toxic substances.
They could offer to testify at thousands of legal trials where Big Pharma, the APA, and organized medicine are being sued for criminal negligence in all the suicides and mass shootings where psychiatric drugs have played a key role.
There will be many decades of work and the need for many major Revolutionary changes in society before we are even close to having the material conditions in the world to actually abolish Psychiatry.
BUT, can you say the this is NOT the highest moral stance that needs to be taken by the most conscious psychiatrists in the world? Is it not important for the most conscious AND moral psychiatrists to look beyond their own narrow guild interests in these times and take a political stance that could truly hasten the end of all forms of psychiatric abuse?
Respectfully, Richard
Report comment
Richard:
Sorry for the delay. You have certainly given me food for thought. For now, what I want to focus on, is alerting more and more people to psychiatry’s lies and harms through writing. I have written several articles, which I hope to publish on this website, that are based on my years of experience within the field having given me insight and understanding into how psychiatry became the destructive monster that it now is. I believe this website could be a means to change this, but we need to spread the word about it and bring more people into these discussions, so that it becomes more mainstream. Since people usually go, or send their children, of their own volition to biological psychiatrists, getting the truth to them should help them realize this would be a disastrous mistake which should be avoided. Thank you for your ideas, and lets continue to work together.
Lawrence
Report comment
Lawrence
Thanks for being open to this dialogue. Perhaps at a future time (the sooner the better) we can once again explore in greater detail the essence of these vitally important issues.
Yes, we have so much work to do and your ideas and experience have made a valuable contribution to this much needed political movement.
Richard
Report comment
Identity lies beneath beliefs and self-definitions, that automatically set interpretations, responses or reactions, that result in particular physiological expressions, that are then interpreted as a diagnosis of one kind or another, as if one is subject to, victim or trapped in one’s own thinking – which is in a sense true of any fragmented sense of mind running unconscious of its predicate.
If you can see that intolerable and overwhelming psychic-emotional conflict calls upon defences such as denial, dissociation, along with various strategies of attempt to escape, overcome, fix or redefine self/world within a narrative continuity masking over a feared or hated sense of self/truth/existence – then you have a sense of the personality structure by which to entrance an experience of separated ‘physical’ existence as one’s Reality-experience. The breakdown of the masking strategies corresponds with the resurgence of deeper energetic of what was otherwise denies awareness. When this is itself denied or aborted rather than mid-wived to birthing of a new consciousness in but not of the fear-defined ‘world’ – as a result of fears and guilts embodying themselves as social defences against exposure – then he or she will likely meet a world that is blind to their true need and works to maintain and defend a false sense of power and protection under the core beliefs of fear-defined self and world masked in terms of help, protection or law and order.
Growing a culture of willingness for integrative healing unto a wholeness of being is really the uncovering of a true foundation. In some sense this cannot fully be accepted without looking truly at the false – which in some sense is the last thing we would abide or countenance and not something we would or could wilfully ‘do’. However the integrative movement of our being is active through every willingness as the step by step transformation of our core beliefs and definitions – not only individually but as a whole – for the fragmentation of wholeness cannot be ‘understood’ or from the fragmented mind – but a true or integral part is not broken from wholeness – but that recognition cannot be administered in a pill or injected or ‘added’ to a sense of self-lack. And all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men cannot and need not put Humpty together again.
However the belief in loss of love to abandonment, rejection, betrayal, isolation and struggle is very deeply conditioned as a result of millennia of attempt to fix, overcome or redefine and adapt within it. We all carry different facets of a communication breakdown in a constellation of entanglement where we are triggered and triggers of conditioned reaction.
The result of underlying anxieties, rages, impotence or sense of invalidity or worthlessness is self-destructive and therefore relationally destructive. However the key is not to carry this as a burden of blame, but to carry a curiosity and willingness to notice what is really setting our choices – without adding blame – so as to be available to a different choice from a shifted perspective as a result of NOT accepting the old pattern-habit as a basis to act from, decide in or think as. It does not matter the degree of willingness so much as a moment of true willingness pauses the ‘machinery’ of reactive identity.
The ‘capture’ of the mind in fear-chemistry results in the over stimulation of the fight or flight response as an autonomous habit-reaction by which all other relational perspectives are suppressed and seemingly cut off or lost. Magical redistributions of psychic energy are compromises in which some quality of calm can facilitate better decisions and outcomes – but if these become a persistent resort as an enforcer of limitation of consciousness, they serve a fear agenda and hinder to the degree the one seeking help gives allegiance to joining.
Healing is an inside job – but the nature of the alignment or synchronicity of events means that the right person or promptings can come at the right time even amidst a crazy world. In this sense ‘inside’ is not inside the dissociative thinking – but the movement of our being in a form we can recognize, accept and appreciate.
All is Communication – and yet within a Total Communication are specific and unique expressions of who we truly are – that are mixed up with who we fear to be or wish to be and fear we cannot be. The insanity of the world that aligns in insane thinking is not sane just because it adapts to the intolerable as a sense of ‘control’ and limitation or avoidance of consequence. The recognition of inanity is the rewakening of Sanity – for only those who know they need healing seek and find the conditions. The insane know not what they do and seek to work out their ‘salvation’ on others as if then to become ‘better’ or ‘wiser’ or more ‘powerful’ along with a sense of validating their mask. True ‘therapists’ recognize they need to listen and learn from their ‘patients’ for the recognition of true worth in another is the rewakening of our own and any focus on symptoms apart from such truly shared purpose is a lost cause – or rather the assigning of cause to effects by which to seem to be without a true will – under definitions imposed from ‘outside’.
True will is a gift of listening or of feeling discernment as a result of pausing the false. False because the mind can substitute forms and symbols and images for your desire and fulfilment, but can never actually deliver or fulfil the true of you. It is a mask or persona that can be released or realigned to serve a clearer acceptance of who you are – but the way of it is very different and the conflict of persisting the old while the new is not wholly welcomed, reflects in all kinds of misalignments that are themselves feedback experience from which to recognize, learn and grow freedom from baggage that no longer serves.
Self attack – as self-rejection or self-judgement is the bottom line. Others can ‘teach’ you this from their own mis-learning – but you choose to learn it for your own reasons at the time – albeit on the fly and with no sense of choice made in awareness. You did not ‘learn’ everything that you were exposed to by your upbringing but on some level you have the characteristics and material with which to uncover the true of you by living from it in the ways you can. Much that seems forwards is backwards and likewise some seeming failures are genuine advances. The mind is not your friend until it agrees to be your servant rather than your master. So learn to pause to presently feel the quality and the nature of your thought rather than be run by it as if no other choice is possible. If you so desire.
Report comment
While the makeup of the brain is contingent on individual experiences, it makes sense that there should be workarounds to therapy, for example with medications. What’s wrong with people drugging themselves to feel happy and not actually addressing their problems with therapy?
Report comment
When you wake up from the numbing, or the placebo effect wears off, your problems (such as failing to reach your goals in life) are still there. This is a particularly big waste of opportunity for young people, who are still flexible/adaptive enough to make changes in their coping styles, and since there is still plenty of time left to turn their lives around. And if the main coping tool they learn while young is chemical suppression of their feelings and issues, they are more likely to be vulnerable to drug abuse. Hence we now have a young adult heroin epidemic, the legacy of modern (biological) psychiatry.
Report comment
I don’t see it as ‘wrong’ to seek to evade problems that you are not currently willing to face or embrace – but is a choice with consequences like all others – so if making a conscious choice – you are allowing consciousness in – whereas if running from consciousness of problems you don’t even know you are conscious and have choice – because the ‘problem’ is defining your experience without your awareness that is so.
It can be said we learn by mistakes but that is not a recommendation to go and hurt yourself and others so as to ‘learn’ anything.
Lack of real relationships is the driver for false associations. Sometimes the light from another gifts one who believes they have none or deserve none. We all know at least some moment of what it is to be seen or listened to and extended worth – and if we haven’t yet – we will recognize the quality of this in a place that transactional relationships shy away from.
I don’t know about ‘reaching goals in life’ as a measure of success. Aligning with what you truly want and living that is the discovery of who you are in all kinds of ways that setting goals can work against. But for some that is how their minds work and so that is the way they structure the uncovering of what they really want – often by experiencing what in fact does not meet the expectation. How much of the human experience is waking to who you are via the exhaustion of all that you are not?
In that sense, the prodigal moment of bottoming out may be hollow riches or a hollow result of the evaporation or breakdown of false sense of self. I see many strong voices in the comments here and my sense is that many here have come through some degree of personal reality breakdown.
Load of people get heroin in hospital under different names who do not go on to become addicted. But most psychoactive drugs generate imbalance that is hard for many to get off – not as a loss of a high – but from the keeping at bay of extremely difficult psych-emotional and physical states. But I am sure you know this.
Many lauded poets, artists or thinkers availed themselves of various substances – but the state legislates our right to explore and experience and learn from doing so – while at the same time forcing or coercing dangerous drugs on the failure to comply and conform…
Report comment
Nothing wrong with doing so. But there IS something wrong with calling it “medical treatment” and claiming that the condition is caused by a “chemical imbalance” just so you can make buku bucks off of insurance coverage.
Report comment
This is a brilliant article, although it is partly because so much of what is obvious is not obvious to psychiatric researchers.
I think about the same concepts as the author in saying that biochemistry is the conduit, expression, or vessel through which our experience in life expresses itself. In this way, there is no more sense in saying that the alterations in brain chemicals while taking an enjoyable piano lesson are a disease, than saying that feeling depressed after one’s mother dies is a disease. Feelings and their neurobiological correlates simply are what they are, and they involve the environment and the organism interacting dynamically.
Psychiatry barely recognizes the influence of the environment, especially with “severe mental illness”, and thus its practitioners are largely helpless to help such people, since they see a disease rather than a person to be understood. Meanwhile, the real goals are achieved: get the cash flowing in via quick pill prescriptions, appear to be a doctor treating a medical disease, and retain patients for life since chemical suppression does not solve real life issues, at least not usually.
Report comment
I agree. Lots of studies have shown that it is HUMAN EXPERIENCE that brings about changes in brain chemicals and also result structural changes in the brain. Mice subjected to various psychological stresses (e.g. being restrained) clearly show dendritic atrophy and loss of dendritic spines [see: Popoli M, et al. (2012), The stressed synapse: the impact of stress and glucocorticoids on glutamate transmission, Nature reviews Neuroscience. 2011;13(1):22-37.] – these changes are reversible through psychological means (e.g. when stressed, restrained animals are released as described in the same article). Other studies have shown that as taxi drivers do their jobs (psychological causes), the brain changes. Jugglers gain more grey matter in certain areas as a result of engaging in juggling. Various psychological habits, choices, etc., can also change the brain. For example, research has also shown that impulsivity trait results in reductions in gray matter. On the other hand, mindfulness practices (that result in reductions in impulsivity) are known to change the structure and function of the brain in positive ways (e.g. increases in gray matter and cortical thickness).
The psychiatrists get this CAUSATION TOTALLY WRONG – they think the causation happens the other way around.
Report comment
Nancy99:
I am a psychiatrist, and I don’t think that psychiatrists really think that. I think they know the truth (we all learn it in medical school), but have learned that they can make much more money by lying to people and telling them what they want to hear (that they are victims of a brain disease for which there is a miracle pill), than they can make by being honest with people and doing helpful psychotherapy.
Lawrence
Report comment
Thank you Lawrence. Another thing is: although psychiatrists talk about chemical variations (and therefore, the need for medication), we need to remember that despite decades of research, scientists have not been able to find any structural or other brain differences between patients with ‘mental conditions’ and healthy individuals (this is why there are no objective tests to ‘detect’ them). But with time (after a label is given) structural differences seem to happen either because of the intake of medication or due to the added burden of receiving a label (lots of extra psychological stress to get a label and psychological stresses change the brain). Supporting this idea, a recent study found very few differences between the different disorders in terms of the distribution of the group differences across the brain. See: Sprooten, E., et al. (2017). Addressing reverse inference in psychiatric neuroimaging: Meta‐analyses of task‐related brain activation in common mental disorders. Human brain mapping, 38(4), 1846-1864. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.23486/abstract
Report comment
That was an interesting study, Nancy. I am surprised the NIMH funded it. I agree with your statement about the harm of labels. Saying that someone “has” a mental illness, is really the antithesis of what being human means, since we have a limitless ability to learn infinitely different ways to behave, adapt, and cope. Labels trick people, and those around them, into needlessly throwing in the towel.
Report comment
I agree with you Lawrence. Also, labels increase stigma.
What someone facing mental issues needs is a lot of hope, support and interventions that can calm the mind – definitely not fancy labels and drugs.
Regarding the need for going “beyond biology” and materialistic explanations of behavior (an issue addressed by several commenters here) – do you know that Buddhist teachings have comprehensively analyzed the mind (consciousness)? (and this understanding goes way beyond current mainstream psychological understandings). You may wish to read the following article:
Karunamuni, N. and Weerasekera, R. (June, 2017), Theoretical Foundations to Guide Mindfulness Meditation: A Path to Wisdom, Current Psychology.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12144-017-9631-7
Report comment
maybe it would be helpful if psychiatrists also learned about nutritional psychiatry….besides just talking…
Report comment
Right here, epthe wrote,
“I’ve been banned from the schizophrenia forum which is ran by mostly mothers of schizophrenics and they sure want keep their offspring on anti-psychotic meds.”
https://www.madinamerica.com/forums/topic/do-people-think-mia-is-going-downhill/page/3/#post-104014
Our society creates the fallacy of mental illness, and it does it to reinforce existing power relations and conditions for legitimacy. And so long as we cooperate with it, it is just going to get worse.
Report comment
Would discovering the mythology of “mental illness” explain its cause? Some people say religion is a need the human species has, but I, dispensing with such superstitious nonsense entirely, tend to be a skeptic about the matter myself. I don’t think there is a lot of reliable and verifiable proof that “mental illness” has anything to do with biology, except in so far as the treatments received for it injure the people being so treated.
Report comment
This is very well written article by a doctor that clearly poses some very thought provoking points and counter points to multi-subject matters. Throughout this article, Doctor Kelmenson is looking for the “correlates” that have been established or explained. Chemical processes are reactionary; however, don’t treat the actual causes, and in today’s society, there is a pill for everything. I believe he is 100% correct on his thoughts regarding patients being misled by their doctors. It’s become to easy to treat a patient with a pill instead; and the cause of that is greed.
Clearly, Doctor Kelmenson has a vast amount of knowledge and truly put his time into researching his subject matter; I want to thank him for providing all of us, a wonderful articile to read. I truly look forward to reading his next article.
Report comment
You are surely right to point out that the micro-physical description of a mental event is not the same thing as the events cause. According to identity theorists those neuro-physiological events and the mental event are one and the same thing, the difference is only one for us in how we represent the co-referring terms as seeming different. The natural presumption of reductionist views is that micro-physical events must have micro-physical causes. Thus the difficulty for people who what to give a non-reductive physicalist account of how ‘higher-level’ causes could be expressed at the micro-neuro-physiological level, but not simply be determined by only micro-level laws. See Jaegwon Kims ‘Causal exclusion problem’. I think the problem can be clarified by understanding that ‘being determined by’ and ‘being determinable from’ are notions that are often unwittingly conflated. Also the assumption that the events at the micro-scale are more fundamental than those on a macro level is highly questionable. I wrote about these issues of ‘downward causation’ here https://plus.google.com/u/0/113765459351777894260/posts/j2gBtt7d6wE
Report comment