Some people believe psychiatry can find the true essence of mental disorders
One perspective on psychiatry comes form those fundamentalist materialists who have great faith in science to detect the true essence of things. For them, mental disorders will soon reveal their secrets through scientific study. This optimism was shared by most biological psychiatrists until about fifteen years ago but, except for a few diehards, is now rapidly fading away. Billions of research dollars have failed to produce convincing evidence that any mental disorder is a discrete disease entity with a unitary cause. An overabundance of dopamine in schizophrenics has yet to be found, and a shortage of serotonin in the brain has not yet been found in depression patients. Dozens of different candidate genes have been “found,” but in follow-up studies each turned out to be fool’s gold. Mental disorders are too heterogeneous in presentation and in causality to be considered simple diseases; instead each of our currently defined disorders will eventually turn out to be many different diseases.
References
- Frances, Allen. (2013). Saving Normal CHAPTER 1. What’s Normal and What’s Not? (p. 39). New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychiatry / Philosophy / Epistemology Status:☀️