“Depression is really a chemical imbalance of the brain” – just one more branch on the eugenics tree 12/03/2012

Two Northwestern professors (Cristina Traina and Laurie Zoloth) wrote an article in response to a college student’s suicide, entitled “Culture stigmatizing mental illness must change.” It reads, in part:

Learning to accept your limits is learning what it means to be human. Realize that although difficult events can trigger depression and suicide, depression is really a chemical imbalance in the brain. You can no more adjust this balance than a diabetic can will their body to make more insulin or a person with low thyroid production can think themselves out of fatigue. At the physical level, the brain, like any organ, can become unable to function properly — in this case, to imagine that there are other futures beyond the intensity, or the injustice, or the pain of this moment.

What can you do for yourself and your friends? First, get rid of the stigma around depression, suicidal thoughts and treatment for mental illness. We need to learn to talk about mental illness like we talk about cancer, a serious emotional and physical crisis that can be treated, whose sufferers need support and decency and understanding as they face a life-threatening illness. Depression and anxiety are more common than asthma. You wouldn’t stigmatize a friend for using her inhaler; she shouldn’t feel shame if she uses Prozac to function, too.

- from Culture stigmatizing mental illness must change

I had to respond.

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FROM: ALT
TO: Cristina Traina and Laurie Zoloth
CC: Editors, Northwestern Daily and Huffington Post College
SUBJECT: Response to your article: “Culture stigmatizing mental illness must change”

Dear Professors,

In your recent Huffington Post article (Culture stigmatizing mental illness must change), you wrote that “depression is really a chemical imbalance in the brain.” I understand this was not an academic publication – but could you provide a citation to back this up?

Try.

You’ll find it impossible to do so; because this mantra, this advertising slogan is about as scientific as the statement that “the best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup!” The best? Really?

Meanwhile, let me provide with you with a few citations of my own:

[Antidepressant] advertising campaigns have revolved around the claim that SSRIs correct a chemical imbalance caused by a lack of serotonin… Contemporary neuroscience research has failed to confirm any serotonergic lesion in any mental disorder, and has in fact provided significant counterevidence to the explanation of a simple neurotransmitter deficiency… In fact, there is no scientifically established ideal “chemical balance” of serotonin, let alone an identifiable pathological imbalance.

- from Lacasse, J.R. & J. Leo (2005) Serotonin and Depression: A disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature.

A serotonin deficiency for depression has not been found.

- Psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen, clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in Prozac Backlash (2000)

 Although it is often stated with great confidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency, the evidence actually contradicts these claims.

- Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience Elliot Valenstein, in Blaming the Brain (1998), which reviews the evidence for the serotonin hypothesis.

But I am not writing merely to correct a factual error in your post – there’s more.

When an advertising gimmick is touted as scientific fact and even entered into the canon of “common sense,” there are bound to be some serious consequences. Consider:

1. Rather than helping us “learn what it means to be human,” as you say, the chemical imbalance theory actually tells us that some people are born with brains that don’t function properly. That are, in some fundamental way, pathological. Put another way, there are the mentally fit and the mentally unfit. Sound familiar? To any student of late 19^th/early 20^th century eugenic thought in the West, it would sound mighty familiar.
2. The theory also supports another common biopsychiatric fallacy: that an individual with a mental health diagnosis will need to take psychiatric medications for the rest of his/her life, to “correct the imbalance,” as the story goes. Long-term use of most classes of psychotropic drugs (including antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers) not only comes with serious, LIFE-THREATENING adverse effects, but can actually serve to make what could be rare occurrences of severe mental emotional/distress chronic and repeating. In some cases, this remains true even after withdrawal from the offending chemical agent. (see Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic for chapters of information devoted to this astonishing truth).
3. Finally, the chemical imbalance theory takes nearly all agency away from the individuals who are suffering from mental/emotional distress – they become the victims of whatever their faulty, off-balance brains inflict on them. You write that a person “can no more adjust this [depression-inducing chemical im]balance than a diabetic can will their body to make more insulin or a person with low thyroid production can think themselves out of fatigue.” How horrible if this were so! The kinder truth is there are many strategies a distressed individual can employ that are not purely chemical or pharmaceutical, but rather make use of the mind, will, spirit, and being. That empower, enliven, and entail a joyful discovery of strength, stamina, and RESILIENCY within the human being, who is indeed FIT TO LIVE in whatever way he/she chooses!

You express a desire to reduce stigma in mental health – I think this is admirable. Unfortunately, several scientific studies have demonstrated without a doubt that the “chemical imabalance” theory of mental health issues has the opposite effect: it increases stigma.

For example, in 1997 Sheila Mehta of Auburn University conducted a simple experiment on stigma in mental health, comparing the “chemical imbalance” model to the psychosocial model (which acknowledges a broad variety of factors – including family, past trauma, diet, environment, etc. – as potential contributors to emotional distress). 

55 male college students were enrolled, and each one was told that he and a partner would have to do a simple learning task. The partner was actually a confederate, who would disclose a mental illness to the subject and then explain either that he had this illness because of “the kind of things that happened to me when I was a kid” [psychosocial] or that he had “a disease just like any other, which affected my biochemistry” [biochemical].

It turned out the group presented with the biochemical explanation were far more likely to treat their partners harshly than the group presented with the psychosocial one.  Says Mehta, “The results of the current study suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in disease terms.  We say we are being kind, but our actions suggest otherwise… Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species.” [See: Mehta, S. (1997).  Is being “sick” really better?  Effects of disease view of mental disorder on stigma]

Rather than learning “to talk about mental illness like we talk about cancer” by doing as you suggest and falsely promoting it as a merely physical problem of chemicals out of balance,  I say we need to talk about mental and emotional distress in psychosocial context. AND in context of community, society. What is it about our culture, our rather toxic life on this planet, that makes people sick? And even more importantly, what can we as a society learn from these individual experiences of distress?

I take it you are sincere in your desire to help young people support each other in dealing with the distress that seems to hit so hard at the dawn of true adulthood. Surely, as scholars and seekers of knowledge, you recognize that truth, however complicated and elusive it may be, is vastly preferable to an oversimplified falsehood? Especially when that truth embraces the human potential to survive and thrive, while the falsehood embraces a technocratic romance with chemicals and a eugenical division of what were once human beings into groups of “fit” and “unfit” participants in this consumerist, sick culture.

If you want to help, tell the truth. If you’re not sure what the truth is, take the time to find out. Go slow, think critically, ask questions. Look for the roots of ideas, the beginnings of things, and then follow them from earth to sky – and all the branchings inbetween.

This will not be easy – psychiatry is a strange plant, indeed. But our community needs you to be more than just professors; we need you to be professors of TRUTH.

Can you? Will you?

Yours truly,

Alice Tremont
Mental health writer and activist
http://altmentalities.wordpress.com

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UPDATE:

I have received a response from one of the professors. She actually seems pretty open to considering what I said and has asked for time to research the information I shared. I’m not going to post her response yet because I’d like to win her trust — I think she really wants to dialogue! — but I hope to document our conversation here once it’s developed a bit more. I’m looking forward to a valuable exchange with her.