Neuron Therapy

Mental illness, medicine’s new battleground: does mental illness really exist?
Observer, 12 May 2013. pp 1, 10, 11

While holding no brief for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or Big Pharma, I believe the British Psychology Society’s statement falls into the error usually reserved for economists: throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Of course, focus on talking as a cure-all means more demand for Cognitive Behavioural Therapists, so in that sense the BPS’s stance is rational. But trashing the vast scientific progress made, in recent decades, to understand the brain and genetics, is beyond unhelpful to people suffering from mental disturbance.
The obsession of Oliver James, who claims child abuse is the main cause of schizophrenia is simplistic. How can the studies he refers to be credited, when, in fact, sufferers from schizophrenic paranoia can be convinced that they were abused as small children, just as they can believe they are under attack from helicopters, and yet know, when they recover from psychosis, that these were just symptoms of their illness.
The nonsense he peddles about DNA in order to bolster his theory will not, of course, stem the advance of genomics and proteomics. Research into polymorphisms - differences in the code of a gene - has shown, for example, that these can result in excessive sensitivity to certain substances, making some individuals more susceptible than others to alcoholism, say, or drug addiction.
James and the BPS do nothing to develop understanding of states of mind and how they are generated in the brain. Any concept of mind as an entity in its own right relies on faith and not on science. Mind is a product of the physical brain. The billions of neurons in the brain communicate by means of neurotransmitters creating thought and hence action. If there is overproduction, depletion or imbalance of these neurotransmitters thought will be affected. Ask anyone who has taken ecstasy: swallow a chemical compound in a little pill and enter a euphoric state where love abounds… until the comedown! Ingesting E leads to overproduction of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine which cause this happy state of mind.
Certainly there must be mechanisms whereby responses to life events are activated in the brain’s messaging system and whereby thought feeds back to generate mental disturbance such as depression. But it would be senseless to concentrate on discussion of life events in talking therapy, however pleasant and helpful, and close down research into their physical impact on the brain and other causes of neurotransmitter imbalance, especially when neurotransmitter replacement therapy could well lead to recovery from many mental disturbances.