PSEUDOSCIENCE Blaming the Brain

“More and more problems have been redefined as ‘disorders’ or ‘illnesses’, supposedly caused by genetic predispositions and biochemical imbalances. Life events are relegated to mere triggers of an underlying biological time bomb. Feeling very sad has become ‘depressive disorder.’ Worrying too much is ‘anxiety disorder’. … Making lists of behaviors, applying medical-sounding labels to people who engage in them, then using the presence of those behaviors to prove they have the illness in question is scientifically meaningless.”
— John Read, senior lecturer in psychology at Auckland University, New Zealand, 2004

The cornerstone of psychiatry’s disease model today is the con- cept that a brain-based, chemi- cal imbalance underlies mental disease. While popularized by heavy marketing, it is simply wishful psychiatric thinking. As with all of psychiatry’s disease models, it has been thoroughly discredited by researchers.

Dr. Valenstein is unequivocal: “[T]here are no tests available for assessing the chemical status of a living person’s brain.” Also, no “bio- chemical, anatomical, or functional signs have been found that reliably distinguish the brains of mental patients.”

Dr. Colbert says. "We know that the chemical imbalance model for mental illness has never been scientifically proven. We also know that all reasonable evidence points instead to the disabling model of psychiatric drug action. Furthermore, we also know that the research on drug effectiveness /efficacy are unreliable because drug tests only measure efficacy based on symptom reduction, not cure.”

In 2002, Prof. Thomas Szasz, stated: “There is no blood or other biological test to ascertain the presence or absence of a mental illness, as there is for most bodily diseases. If such a test were developed (for what, heretofore, had been considered a psychiatric illness), then the condition would cease to be a mental illness and would be classified, instead, as a symptom of a bodily disease.”

In his book, The Complete Guide to Psychiatric Drugs,, published in 2000, Edward Drummond, M.D., Associate Medical Director at Seacoast Mental Health Center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, stated, “First, no biological etiology [cause] has been proven for any psychiatric disorder … in spite of decades of research. ... So don’t accept the myth that we can make an ‘accurate diagnosis.’ … Neither should you believe that your problems are due solely to a ‘chemical imbalance.’”

An article published in May 2004 in the U.S. newspaper The Mercury News warned that brain scans also cannot determine “mental illness”: “Many doctors warn about using the SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) [brain] imaging as a diagnostic tool, saying it is unethical—and potentially dangerous— for doctors to use SPECT to identify emotional, behavioral and psychiatric problems in a patient. The $2,500 evaluation offers no useful or accurate information, they say.”

Quoted in The Mercury News article was psychiatrist M. Douglas Mar, who 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,” admitted Dr. Michael D. Devous from the Nuclear Medicine Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

While there has been no shortage of biochemical explanations for psychiatric conditions, Joseph Glenmullen is emphatic: “… [N]ot 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.”

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 pro- moting drug treatment.”

Psychiatry makes “unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety, alcoholism and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin…. This kind of faith in science and progress is staggering, not to mention naïve and perhaps delusional.”
— David Kaiser, psychiatrist

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