Worth a read.
When I sought help for crippling invasive thoughts, I was told I had a disease like any other. But I wasn’t able to recover until I understood the fallacy at the heart of mental healthcare
www.theguardian.com
From the article :
“I’m troubled that we’re telling people who’ve got genuinely difficult lives that the problem is inside their brain rather than outside in the world,” I said to Canadian doctor Gabor Maté when I interviewed him.
“It’s poor kids and kids of colour who are most likely to be diagnosed and medicated,” he replied. “This is trying to deal pharmacologically with what is essentially a social problem … All those years, when you were told that you had a biological disorder, did anybody ever tell you that your brain is shaped by the environment?”
“No,” I replied.
“That’s what the science has shown for decades.”
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The turning point came when I visited Trinity College Dublin to interview neuroscientist Prof Claire Gillan for a mental health charity podcast. Gillan was studying feelings and behaviours across a variety of psychiatric diagnoses. I was accustomed to softball media engagements about fighting stigma, and expected more of the same. I asked what she had discovered.
“OCD is not a biological reality,” Gillan said, very matter of factly. “That’s what the data increasingly shows.”
A lump rose in my throat. I fumbled for a response. Hadn’t researchers proved that OCD brains are different biologically? (Some neuroimaging studies show increased activity in various cortices.) “Abnormalities in these regions are by no means exclusive to OCD,” Gillan said. “A great many disorders show the same kinds of brain changes.”
I didn’t know this. I thought my brain shared the same abnormalities as everyone else with OCD and that these were the root causes of our obsessions; that we had brains that were measurably different from the brains of people with, say, ADHD or anorexia. I thought this was the definition of “official” diagnosis. Gillan explained that, on the contrary,
psychiatric diagnoses are not based on biomarkers, they are subjective constructs.
<insert OT joke here>
