A Viennese doctor named Ignace Semmelweis was treated as an heretic for suggesting that obstetricians wash their hands between the autopsy room and the delivery room when women were dying like flies from puerperal fever, a childbirth infection caused of course by humours in the air.

Today, in our sophisticated techno-scientific era, “everyone knows” that depression is caused by “a chemical imbalance in the brain” and anyone who doesn’t know this is very ill-informed. Everyone also knows that this chemical imbalance is a genetically inherited organic illness which, in this case, needs to be treated with “medicine”, just like diabetes and epilepsy.

To formulate human suffering as a biological illness is enormously appealing to people because it grants us instant relief from feelings of guilt and helplessness, from fear of accountability in ourselves and others and especially from the unknown. Biological psychiatrists tell us that neurotransmitter depletion in certain parts of the brain (the famous “chemical imbalance”) can be demonstrated in the depressed human being and that the medications which so successfully relieve the debilitating effects of clinical depression can be shown to restore normal neurotransmitter levels in humans. It is, of course, very tempting to draw a causal relationship between these two apparent findings. This is fair enough.

In my opinion, the trouble starts when an intentional assumption is then added. The neurochemical changes are first anointed as the primary cause of the depression; then they have conferred upon them a genetic status. Now we have a simple genetic illness which causes depression in perfectly normal people, for no reason other than mechanics. The depression itself is deemed to be meaningless.

It has always seemed strange to me that we invoke genetics and neurochemistry as the exclusive fundamental cause of psychiatric disorders when their explanation is so often available to the naked eye of a reasonably intelligent and sensitive observer. We are so enraptured by the seemingly magical powers of science that we have had to start to refer to something called “scientism” to account for its excesses, i.e. materialistic reductionism, concrete thinking and a doctrinaire loss of the ability to think about intangibles like emotions and the drama of the human psyche. The term “scientific” has come to mean that which can be weighed and measured, only.

Here’s the rub. What if depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders (eating disorders, post-partum disorders, etc.) are meaningful expressions of the normal function of the human mind in a perfectly normal brain? What if the mind causes the “chemical imbalance” and not a gene? What if brain disorder is the expression of a distressed psyche rooted in human experience and buffeted by overwhelming life events which go much deeper and earlier than even intimate social and interpersonal problems?

Pages: « [ 1 ]  2  »