>3. A suggestion that affective disorders can be cured by changing the
>person's attitude rather than his/her brain chemistry smells of new age
>quackery - akin to faith healing or efforts to "cure" gay people by
>proper therapy.
Both are quackery. Saying that mental disorders are caused by "brain chemistry" is laughable. Of course everything that happens in the brain is caused by chemistry, but to pronounce the "cause" of something as complex as an emotional state in such vague terms is quite inane. All emotions are "caused" by "brain chemistry", if you want to put it like that, but the observation is hardly much help in understanding human emotions.
To say you can cure people of "inappropriate" emotions is true at one level. You can also "cure" people by lobotomy. These techniques "work" by simply destroying the higher functions of the human brain, of which emotions are a part. Killing a person will also cure them of all emotions and this is rather an apt analogy in that destroying a person's personality is a bit like killing the person outright or chemically destroying their personality.
Either is a "cure", but is the cure better than the "disease"?
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas