Claims or suggestions that today’s brain imaging technology has proven that mental illness is caused by diseases or chemical imbalances in the brain are pure psychiatric fancy.

Steven Hyman, director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health admits that use of such brain scans produce “pretty but inconsequential pictures of the brain.”

While psychiatrists claim that brain scans can now detect certain mental disorders, a May 2004 article in The Mercury News says that many doctors warn that the use of such scans is “unethical” and “dangerous,” quite apart from not being scientifically validated. “The $2,500 evaluation offers no useful or accurate information.”

Quoted in the same article, psychiatrist M. Douglas Mar said, “There is no scientific basis for these claims [of using brain scans for psychiatric diagnosis]. At a minimum, patients should be told that SPECT is highly controversial.”

“An accurate diagnosis based on a scan is simply not possible. I wish it were,” stated Dr. Michael D. Devous from the Nuclear Medicine Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Dr. Mark Graff of the California Psychiatric Association, candidly admitted, “The history of medicine is littered with lovely procedures that end up not working at all. We wish there was a test that is so easy and definitive. But first we want independent confirmation that it works.”

Despite the abundance of alleged biochemical explanations for supposed psychiatric conditions, Joseph Glenmullen of Harvard Medical School 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.”

BOGUS BRAIN THEORY
Presented in countless illustrations in popular magazines, psychiatric researchers have dissected, labeled and analyzed the brain while assailing the public with the latest theory of what is wrong with it. What is lacking, as with all psychiatric theory, is scientific validity. As Dr. Elliot Valenstein explained, “[T]here are no tests available for assessing the chemical status of a living person’s brain.”

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