This depression scenario requires biologic determinism, the belief that the etiology or cause is biologic and is primarily due to a genetic flaw, although again none of this has ever been proven. Biologic determinism is by definition a belief. And finally, cause and effect are joined together arbitrarily to suggest that a causes b causes c , as if a, b and c were actual physical bodies impacting each other, when in fact they are merely abstractions being thought about in a certain order. I have sketched this out briefly to demonstrate that the constructions of mental illness by biologic psychiatry are based almost entirely on underlying assumptions about the human mind that are entirely questionable. And of course the worst thing about these constructions is what they leave out or effectively silence, namely all the potential richness and depth of human suffering and experience.
Biological psychiatry is boring.
I realized upon receiving my most recent clinical psychiatric journal that I cannot remember the last time I heard or read anything compelling or exciting at a psychiatric conference or in a psychiatric journal. The whole discourse of biologic psychiatry is one-dimensional and flat. Personally I look elsewhere for sustenance to deepen my work with patients, for example the great psychologists of the modern age like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Freud. Biologic psychiatry is uninteresting because it has become increasingly irrelevant to the realities of patients, increasingly remote from the complexities and depths of human nature and the human soul, and increasingly unhelpful to psychiatrists trying to do real work with patients. Human nature will always be an open question.