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Poster: Brian
Subject: RE: Mental disorders ARE NOT brain disorders.
Body:
Know-it-all wrote:
One's state of mind is much more than a reflection of the chemical environment of his brain. There is another, equally important component of the conscious experience, which is mental content, or the intellectual framework through which one perceives reality and the premises that guide his actions and dictate his emotional responses. A person can have serious psychological problems or experience a state of mental distress (such as anxiety or depression) without having anything physiologically wrong with his brain; such a person's problems are usually the result of some combination of bad mental content and bad circumstances.
Unfortunately, modern psychiatric practice makes little or no effort to distinguish between psychological problems caused by errors of thinking and true brain disorders caused by physiological abnormalities. The claim that depression is caused by a "chemical imbalance" is self-serving propaganda for the psychiatric establishment and pharmaceutical industry, and its result is that millions of people have been falsely labeled and inappropriately medicated. Psychiatric drugs exert their mood-altering effects not by fixing a "chemical imbalance," but by inducing one.
But, aren't errors of thinking, you know, in the end still biochemical? And how do you tell the difference if there were? The brain is physical and that is all there is. And isn't there an industry, or potential industry, also served by the "errors of thinking" school, that is, psychotherapy?
Rosenberg addresses this veiled metaphysics of the self in An Atheists Guide to Reality. There is nothing outside the physical activity of the brain. Nothing. Nothing.Hit the submit button below if you want us to review the post.
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