Re: Isn't the biological cause of mental illness pointing to the uselessness and wron
Ask yourself this:What will we do when the drugs stop working?.Remember they will stop working unless they continue to create news ones or other methods to treat the mentally ill.
An unfortunately large part of modern psychiatry is based upon the propositions that mental illnesses (a) have a clear and discrete typology and (b) are physical diseases and as such first and foremost require pharmaceutical and other physical remedies. This is so-called "neo-kraepelian" psychiatry, named after Emil Kraepelin, who seemed to fancy himself as the Linnaeus of psychiatry.
The first proposition has very little to back it up in research evidence, if one looks at the detail of how research has been done. For example, definitions of schizophrenia tend to be catch all and are applied wildly differently in different places and at different times; new diagnoses appear all the time, with few clear criteria for what is or is not a newly identified phenomenon.
The second proposition doesn't actually have a lot going for it either, although it's certainly on stronger ground. Pharmaceuticals can help, but they are clearly not the magic bullet that they are presented as being, and our understanding of how they work is not as good as it is presented.
For example, so-called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) have some success alleviating symptoms of depression, but in terms of curing, much less. Furthermore, the serotonin theory of depression itself is not really proven.
Personally, what I find weirdest about the purely medical approach to mental illness is it presumes that brain chemistry can affect mood, but mood cannot affect brain chemistry. It's as if personality, psyche and perception are always downstream of the physical brain. If this were true, we'd never learn anything, or be emotionally affected by anything that happened to us.
I'm sure bright BGOL brains will come to chip in this thread
