The Chemical Imbalance Theory Topples Off Its Pedestal

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is known as the therapist’s Bible, perhaps because we worship at the altar of health insurance reimbursements. In any case, the DSM has dictated treatment for the different kinds of human suffering world-wide for many decades. You would expect this domination of Western medicine would have been based on Western scientific research, but it hasn’t. In this talk James Davies shows what happened. He interviewed the main players in the creation of the DSM and he dug into the archival records of their meetings. He reveals that the DSM was made by a bunch of people getting together in a room and deciding by consensus (not research evidence) what seemed a likely mental health condition and what its criteria ought to be. In other words they basically made it up.

Davies goes on to describe how the psychiatric profession has been corrupted by pharmaceutical industry, with payoffs and bribes to promote their particular products, leading to a vast over-prescription of mental health drugs, falsifying of research, and the prescription of drugs with dubious efficacy. He explodes the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of mental disorders, which maintains that depression is caused by a shortage of serotonin in the brain. This myth has been the backbone of over-prescription for decades.

James Davis

Funnily enough just this week the University College of London came out with a study that shows serotonin levels are no different between depressed people and non-depressed people. One of the lead researchers pointed out in an interview that when anti-depressants help someone that is no proof of a chemical imbalance, since “having a headache does not mean you have a Paracetamol deficiency, or if you are socially anxious at a party that you have an alcohol deficiency.”

Serotonin study

None of this is to say that anti-depressants don’t work, and work well, for some people. But our science has been subsumed under the banner of marketing campaigns and promotions, while the inconvenient truths have been swept under the carpet. The mental health industry has fallen in love with classifying, numbering, and medicalizing. It forgot the fact that we become sad and despairing because of life conditions, trauma, or attachment wounds – not because something went wrong with our brains.