By Peter Kinderman
Scientific American Blog
Originally published on November 17, 2014
Here is an excerpt:
Some neuroscientists have asserted that all emotional distress can ultimately be explained in terms of the functioning of our neural synapses and their neurotransmitter signalers. But this logic applies to all human behavior and every human emotion and it doesn’t differentiate between distress — explained as a product of chemical “imbalances” — and “normal” emotions. Moreover, while it is clear that medication (like many other substances, including drugs and alcohol) has an effect on our neurotransmitters, and therefore on our emotions and behavior, this is a long way from supporting the idea that distressing experiences are caused by imbalances in those neurotransmitters.
Many people continue to assume that serious problems such as hallucinations and delusional beliefs are quintessentially biological in origin, but we now have considerable evidence that traumatic childhood experiences (poverty, abuse, etc.) are associated with later psychotic experiences. There is an almost knee-jerk assumption that suicide, for instance, is a consequence of an underlying illness, explicable only in biological terms.
The entire blog post is here.