This video represents what is so painfully wrong about the medical model of mental illness. TED should be ashamed of promoting such patently misleading and financially motivated crap.
Despite the nonsense Insel and others spout, the only real evidence for genetics in schizophrenia and other mental illnesses is circumstantial at best, and much more likely due to environmental triggering of genes as much as anything else.
In my opinion, 99% of "mental illness" is due to trauma - most of it from interpersonal trauma. There is more than 50 years of evidence for this in attachment theory, another 30 years of evidence in interpersonal neurobiology, and an unknown depth of evidence in the various models of relational psychology going to Harry Stack Sullivan and beyond.
This "brain disorders" model will simply produce more toxic pharmaceuticals that do little more than get people stoned, dependent, and impotent.
TED Talks - Thomas Insel: Toward a New Understanding of Mental Illness
Published on Apr 16, 2013
Today, thanks to better early detection, there are 63% fewer deaths from heart disease than there were just a few decades ago. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, wonders: Could we do the same for depression and schizophrenia? The first step in this new avenue of research, he says, is a crucial reframing: for us to stop thinking about "mental disorders" and start understanding them as "brain disorders." (Filmed at TEDxCaltech.)
Bill, I do not understand your harsh objection to the viddy. At its end, Insel advocates for early intervention for predictable behavioral disorders. I don't see that he is precluding therapeutic intervention.
ReplyDeleteYes, certainly, Insel looks as brain-development as the measure of early onset of problems, with his example relating to schizophrenia -- which, likely, is not typical of other mental illness, generally. But this is a short viddie, providing just the nut of what is going on, for the benefit of uninitiated folk, like myself.
I don't see that Insel is being reductionist; he is just using what available evidence there is. Might not your concerns be premature?
Hi Tom,
ReplyDeleteInsel has a reputation as a reductionist in the realm of mental health. As Director of of the NIMH he sets the tone for research in this country, which when money is limited (as it is now, when Congress deems research as unnecessary) can become a serious issue.
He is much less likely to support funding for integrative or biopsychosocial research into mental illness (which is where the clinical work is moving), but anything that proposes a genetic or bio-chemical explanation of mental illness is much more likely to get funded.
I see this as a huge problem. That is the basis for my concerns.
Bill