Actually, theres really no evidence at all that mental disorders are biologically based its purely hypothetical.
Psychiatry isn't a real science or medicine, it is a system of control masquerading as one.
Rosenhan's 'psudo-patient experiment' and 'non-existent impostor experiment' demonstrated that mental hospital staff are thoroughly incapable from distinguishing mentally ill people from mentally well people. The fact that psychriatrists diagnosis can't reliably distinguish means that the catagories are not based on phyiscal evidence but rather the purely subjective and often prejudiced unsubstantiated beliefs of the individual psychiatrist.
Psychologist Rosenhan published an article,On Being Sane in Insane Places, in the journal Science: a group of research psychologists admitted themselves to in-patient mental health care reporting hallucinations but otherwise, behaved totally normally and explained that the hallucinations were gone...but their psychiatrists interpreted their normal behavior and average histories as aspects of their psychosis; in other words, the diagonistic label defined the lens by which their behavior and personalities were viewed rather than their behavior and personalities informing the diagnosis. While legitimate medicine's diagnosis depend on observation, the observations made by psychistrists depend on diagnosis, and often on sterotypes, allowing them to view healthy individuals as sick.
The "psudo-patient experiment" was followed by the "The non-existent impostor experiment". In this, an established teaching hospital which declared that Rosenhan's experiment could never have been successfully conducted at it, and that its psychiatrists would be able to successfully diagnosis and detect non-mentally ill people from those who ought to be there. Rosenhan than agreed to conduct the same experiment at this teaching hospital, telling them that, over a three month period, he would send an undisclosed number of psudopatients so they can see how well they detect them. Of 193 patients the hospital had in those three months, they decided that they were sure 41 were Rosenhan's psudopatient research assistants, and suspected an additional 42...in reality of course, Rosenhan didn't send anyone.
Rosenhan wrote at the time very aptly:
"Nothing underscores the consensual nature of psychiatric disorders more than the recent action by the American Psychiatric Association to delete homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders (DSM-II, 1968). Whatever one's opinion regarding the nature of homosexuality, the fact that a professional association could vote on whether or not homosexuality should be considered a disorder surely underscores both the differences between psychiatric/mental disorders and the context-susceptibility of psychiatric ones. Changes in informed public attitudes towards homosexuality have brought about corresponding changes in psychiatric perception of it."
The complete article can be found here:
http://www.stanford.edu/~kocabas/onbeingsane.pdf Rosenhan, D. (1973) On being sane in insane places. Science, 179, 250-8
Psychiatry's belief in mental illness as a biologically based disease and therefore requires an organic, drug based treatment model, is purely speculative without any scientific proof. This myth however is Big Buisness that allows the pharmaceutical corporations to construct a profession designed to push their product onto people whether they like it or not.
An excellent article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Keith Hoeller outlines the profit motive behind the psychiatric establishment.
Because the mentally ill often are unaware of their disease, treatment must be forced on the mentally ill. All 50 states have laws that allow involuntary treatment if professionals deem they are a danger to self and others.
Psychiatrists, we are told, can now accurately diagnose mental illness and have safe and effective treatments. Psychiatry is considered a valid medical specialty, like cardiology, and the claims of the movement are based on scientific research.
...
The movement's major source of funding is the highly profitable pharmaceutical industry, which funds the drug research; which funds psychiatric journals, and even the American Psychiatric Association itself; which funds advertising to doctors and the public; and even funds lay groups such as NAMI (at least $11 million) and Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (at least $1 million).
Yet many professionals claim that the mental health movement is not a legitimate medical or scientific endeavor, let alone a civil rights movement, but a political ideology of intolerance and inhumanity. Numerous psychiatrists and psychologists have examined the psychiatric research literature and found it to range from smoke and mirrors to quackery.
Psychiatrists have yet to conclusively prove that a single mental illness has a biological or physical cause, or a genetic origin. Psychiatry has yet to develop a single physical test that can determine that an individual actually has a particular mental illness. Indeed, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders uses behavior, not physical symptoms, to diagnose mental illness, and it lacks both scientific reliability and validity.
...
the surgeon general's report on mental health states that "the precise causes (etiology) of mental disorders are not known" and "there is no definitive lesion, laboratory test, or abnormality in brain tissue that can identify (a mental) illness." The Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry (1999) states: " ... Validation of the diagnostic categories as specific entities has not been established."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/137089_mentalhealth29.html
In other words, while psychiatry proports to be a science and a medicine it has a considerable conflict of interest. The diseases it claims to treat have no empirically testable, indepedently verifiable reality the way that conventional medical disease has, the only basis on which to believe in their existance is the community of mental health professionals that identifies them as such...but are also financially rewarded for doing so. Research on the existance of the 'illness', diagnosis of illnesses in individuals, and profit from getting 'patients' on expensive perscription drugs which they often become chemically depedent on, then, is a closed loop where the only people granted expert status have a financial incentive in reporting particular findings, particular diagnosis, and perscribing particular drugs.
Its no wonder then that different diagnosis come in fads to match the financial needs of drug companies. The entire catagory of bipolar depression in children was essentially invented in order to provide a market for drugs designed for it.
All of the supposed evidence that psychiatrists use to justify themselves has no scientific model for how it works, instead, they observe that some (but not most) people get better from their 'treatment' and claim that this proves that mental illness is an organic illness that can be treated with medication. What they don't say however, is that the degree of success falls within the range of a placebo effect and sugar pills work as well as anti-depressants.
Shankar Vedantam in The Washington Post reported Tuesday, May 7, 2002; Page A01:
After thousands of studies, hundreds of millions of prescriptions and tens of billions of dollars in sales, two things are certain about pills that treat depression: Antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft work. And so do sugar pills.
A new analysis has found that in the majority of trials conducted by drug companies in recent decades, sugar pills have done as well as -- or better than -- antidepressants. Companies have had to conduct numerous trials to get two that show a positive result, which is the Food and Drug Administration's minimum for approval.
What's more, the sugar pills, or placebos, cause profound changes in the same areas of the brain affected by the medicines, according to research published last week. One researcher has ruefully concluded that a higher percentage of depressed patients get better on placebos today than 20 years ago.
- By Tainari88
- By Rancid
- By late