đ§ Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
Two myths can prevent recovery from mental illness.
One says that mental disorders are primarily biological and genetic; the other that theyâre caused by a chemical imbalance.
During the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, despite the lack of concrete evidence, biopsychiatrists declared that our psychic and emotional struggles are âbrain diseases.â Biopsychiatry researchers were never able to position the cause and development of psychiatric disorders primarily in the brain but kept promising that soon (soon!) theyâd be able to. They fed the public potential findings, often overstating their results. Parts of the media helped with catchy headlines.
(Ironically, the push toward the mental-illness-as-a-purely-brain-disease model goes against the title of psychiatryâs only medical manual: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. The definition of mental is âof or relating to the mind,â not the brain as a standalone organ.)
A vocal minority of psychiatrists and researchers pushed the biomedical model. That isnât a crime; the crime is that they campaigned for hypothesized neurological explanations at the expense of other factors, such as environment, personality, trauma, and economic and social injustices. Doing so allowed themâand usâto shirk responsibility. If itâs all biology and genetics, then we can ignore everything else that contributes to mental distress: racial inequality, racism, economic inequality, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, violence.
Psychiatryâs biomedical model was mostly well-intended. Certainly, some, if not many, clinical and academic psychiatrists wanted to help people. In some cases, selfishness, arrogance, and hubris got in the way. And conflicts of interest. Under the direction of one of psychiatryâs most prominent figures, Robert Spitzer, biopsychiatry aimed to (finally) establish psychiatry as a respected field of medicine. (Although some psychiatrists embraced a bio-psycho-social model of mental illness, biopsychiatry dominated the field.) Pharmaceutical companies funded research and plied academic psychiatrists and clinicians with kickbacks to find and tell the public that there could be one cause of mental illness to be remedied by psychotropic drugs.
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