To back up her claim, she cites "Dr. David Burns at Standford and Dr. Elliot S. Valenstein at the University of Michigan who wrote _Blaming the Brain_ (1998)
Burns, who spent many years doing research on brain serotonin metabolism, says he's never seen convincing evidence that psychiatric disorders are the result of deficient brain seratonin. He goes on to say, "In fact, we cannot measure brain serotonin levels in living human beings os there is no way to test this theory. some neoroscientists would question whether the theory is even viable, since the brain does not function ... as a hydraulic system."
what say the brain trust at LBO?
I don't suffer from any of these things and only one person in our family has been diagnosed with a disorder, a niece who has ADHD. My sister, who was in community college at the time, getting a degree to teach pre-school, was really leary of the diagnosis. She spent a lot of time carefully considering the issue, reading research, etc. This was because, when she interned for the school system and headstart, she learned that the schools in NY were using the diagnosis to help weed out poor performing students from the test scores. IIRC, she said that once diagnosed the scores of these kids would be removed from the results, raising the test score average and making the school look better. I think I have that right.
Anyway, my sister was not really keen on simply swallowing what a phsyician told her, but after careful consideration, she put my neice on medication for ADHD. Things have turned out OK and she doesn't regret it.
but other than that, since I've never personally experienced clinical depression (though Google knows that by all rights I should have been declared depressed at some point!), I've always just read what people had to say and assumed they knew best. If they feel they were depressed and it was a chemical imbalance, then that was the way it was. What did I know! But now I'm reading this book and wondering about the degree to which the pharmaceutical industry and physicians have pushed certain diagnoses on people, regardless as to any evidence supporting the diagnosis -- and to an unfortunate result as some folks have taken medicines that are useless or, worse, cause more symptoms that are then treated with more drugs. Or even worse, given drugs that injure or kill them.
so, what is the state of the debate folks who know better than I?
shag