Mental disorders ARE NOT brain disorders.

The mind is what the brain does. End of story. The "self" is what the brain does. As Nietzsche retorted to Pascal's "I think therefore I am" nonsense:

"What separates me most deeply from the metaphysicians is: I don't concede that the 'I' is what thinks. Instead, I take the I itself to be a construction of thinking..."

Nobody can because it's not the case. There is a biological basis for behavior. Except autism; that shit is made up.

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.

Brian wrote:As Nietzsche retorted to Pascal's "I think therefore I am" nonsense:

"What separates me most deeply from the metaphysicians is: I don't concede that the 'I' is what thinks. Instead, I take the I itself to be a construction of thinking..."

Maybe Nietzsche's problem was that reading Pascal instead of Descartes.

Ugh, that was an embarrasing conflation. I was in the middle of doing another thing that involved Pascal's Wager and conflated the two. Jesus, embarassing.

It is a great observation though, especially when there was no such thing as neuroscience.

Brian wrote:

Ugh, that was an embarrasing conflation. I was in the middle of doing another thing that involved Pascal's Wager and conflated the two. Jesus, embarassing.

It is a great observation though, especially when there was no such thing as neuroscience.

Dude, did you just admit to making an error in your post? Wow, that makes two people that I have seen admit to error here on LetsRun.

An exclusive club indeed.

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.

Thoughts aren't even about anything, so I am not sure what an error of thinking is. When you think about something, there is a corresponding neural activity of the brain, nothing more. Better to speak in terms of utility than "error".

Physics swallows everything.

And what makes you think happiness isn't the error in thinking and depression the logical outcome of rational thinking?

There is some evidence that depressed people are less gullible, less apt to be fooled or swindled, and more realistic about probabilities.

In one study, people were asked to push a button at various intervals while a light lit up (at random). Depressed people were far more likely to realize that there pressing the button had no relationship to the light being lit. Happy people were idiots who thought they had control when they had none.

The mind comes from more than the brain, as thought and language are abstractions and approximations or interpretations of experience.

For example, if you are in love with a woman and you look out your front window and see her run over by a truck, your mind will be altered in a way that would be entirely different if you see a cardboard cutout of the woman run over by a truck.

Nothing is different about your brain, but you will find that your thinking, feeling, and perceptions of the world and yourself radically and irrevocably changed for a long, long time.

Don't ask me how I know.

look, I am not sure exactly what the OP's question is, but even if there is no mind outside the brain, I think the point is that EXPERIENCE can effect mind/brain and bring about depression, and EXPERIENCE (therapy, events in one's life, reading books, etc) can fix mind/brain when it comes to many "mental disorders" (low level depression). The other view seems to be that parts of the brain are innately deficient due to genetics or environment (outside of experience) and that only fixing that flaw via medication or an operation (in the good ol' days) is the solution.

Isn't that the difference?

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.

What is "mental content" but a bunch of chemical reactions? If it is more than that, could you please explain exactly what mental content is and how it works?

Brian wrote:

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.

The brain and the body are one. Exercise can counter the effects of depression. Any holistic therapist will tell you that mental disorders can be resolved through bodywork or spiritual healing.

I posted the article because I thought it was one of the dumbest pieces of scientific writing I've ever read IF I understood it correctly. If the authors are saying that not all mental disorders are due to innate improper brain function that can only be treated with drugs, I whole-heartedly agree with them, but it sounded as if they were saying the mind and the brain are separate and that the mind just kind of floats somewhere by itself and isn't influenced by the brain (or is only influences so to a limited extent), in which case I would recommend they take some basic biology and physiology classes.

What they say is fine but hard to understand. They do say, there is little question that all psychological phenomena have biological underpinnings.

I think my earlier points were somewhat valid. Furthermore, I think that the authors mains points are:

while mental/psychological diseases are not disconnected from one's physical being (nothing is), they are quite different from other diseases (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc) in the following ways:

1) despite decades of research, there is nothing even close to a scientific consensus on how to biologically measure or record such diseases (like depression or anxiety), and no drug or surgery treatments that appear to substantially relieve these diseases ( several meta-analyses have shown major anti-depressants to be no more successful than placebo at relieving depression)

2) while stress and other negative or positive experiences can indeed result in negative consequences for one's physical health, such experiences seem to have a much greater impact on mental diseases. And can one "talk" their way out of brain cancer? Of course not. But one CAN receive talk therapy, have new positive experiences, and beat depression. That's a huge difference between two different "brain diseases."

In short, the biology of mental disorders is for the most part quite unknown, and furthermore, EXPERIENCE appears to play a central role in creating mental disorders, as opposed to them being simply regarded as genetic defects or inherent, preexisting, disordered brain chemistry. This separates mental disorders from virtually all other diseases and because of that, they should be treated differently.

boom chucka boom chuka boom wrote:

The mind comes from more than the brain, as thought and language are abstractions and approximations or interpretations of experience.

For example, if you are in love with a woman and you look out your front window and see her run over by a truck, your mind will be altered in a way that would be entirely different if you see a cardboard cutout of the woman run over by a truck.

Nothing is different about your brain, but you will find that your thinking, feeling, and perceptions of the world and yourself radically and irrevocably changed for a long, long time.

Don't ask me how I know.

The architecture of those changes will be biochemical/electrical. We can demonstrate this with neuroscience.

You should read Rosenberg on this. The only way experience works is by changing the physical architecture of the brain.