“Blaming the Brain”

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http://www.cchr.org/doctors/eng/page14.htm

 

" Blaming the Brain "

 

The Great Chemical Imbalance Swindle

 

" The advent of the psychotropic drugs has also given rise to a new

biological language in psychiatry. The extent to which this has come

to be part of popular culture is in many ways astonishing.... This

triumph, however, is not without its ambiguities. It can reasonably be

asked whether biological language offers more in the line of marketing

copy than it offers in terms of clinical meaning. " 71

 

— Dr. David Healy,

The Anti-Depressant Era, 1999

 

The cornerstone of psychiatry's disease model today, is the concept

that a brain-based, chemical imbalance underlies mental disease.72

While popularized by heavy public marketing, it is simply more wishful

psychiatric thinking. As with all of psychiatry's disease models, it

has been thoroughly discredited by researchers.

 

 

BOGUS BRAIN THEORY:

Presented in countless illustrations in popular magazines, the brain

has been dissected and labeled and analyzed while assailing the public

with the latest theory of what is wrong with the brain. What is

lacking, as with all psychiatric pontificating, is scientific fact. As

Dr. Valenstein explained, " [T]here are no tests available for

assessing the chemical status of a living person's brain. "

 

 

 

Valenstein is unequivocal: " [T]here are no tests available for

assessing the chemical status of a living person's brain. " 73 Also, no

" biochemical, anatomical, or functional signs have been found that

reliably distinguish the brains of mental patients. " 74

 

Dutch psychiatrist Hermann van Praag, whose 1993 book, " Make-Believes "

in Psychiatry, details how researchers thought they had discovered a

deficiency in a chemical cousin to serotonin in the cerebrospinal

fluid of some depressed patients. " In the end, the deficiency proved

neither diagnostic nor specific for any psychiatric condition. Still,

patients are often given the impression that a definitive serotonin

deficiency in depression is firmly established " when none has been

found.75

 

While there has been no shortage of biochemical explanations for

psychiatric conditions, Glenmullen is emphatic: " ...not one has been

proven. Quite the contrary. In every instance where such an imbalance

was thought to have been found, it was later proven false. " 76

 

According to Valenstein, " The theories are held on to not only because

there is nothing else to take their place, but also because they are

useful in promoting drug treatment. " 77