A building is bricks plus design. Study the bricks alone and youll never, ever understand the building. Yet this is the reductionist error contemporary psychiatry continues to make. In the human brain, no gene expresses itself with environmental interaction. Yet we continue to be fascinated with genes and molecules, alone, as if they are the whole story. This is NEVER the case. Dr. Ross talks about this in the video below (13 min.+). He has always impressed me as an unusually intelligent and thoughtful mental health professional. A number of his books are among the most prized in my professional library. In this video he very correctly takes aim at the failure of biological psychiatry to produce what its been promising, and urges that a transformation is needed. In short, too many people seem to want a simple magic bean (medical) solution to mental illness, but after decades of research effort this magic has yet to be found. There is a good reason for this: were not being scientific enough. A good scientist would look at ALL the relevant data, not just that which he/she is most comfortable with. Thats not whats happening. We already have good research indicating major real causes of mental illness (personal history, social stresses), and its mostly being ignored in professional psychiatry. Im happy to say that its NOT being ignored elsewhere, but overall progress is still far too slow. When I protest against the longstanding tendency to try to reduce mental illness to genetics and molecules, Im saying the same thing Ross is saying. We all desire simple solutions, but diseases of the mind are functional problems in the most complex aggregation of matter in the known universe. And you want to fix this with a pill? Really? That seems just a bit delusional, to me. https://youtube/watch?v=RKNOem8khKg
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 01:57:48 +0000