Notice the medical jargon such as illness, remission, response, imbalance . Notice that nothing is needed in the way of the person's life narrative. Notice the absence of words like sadness, despair, loss, frustration . What is lacking in the above account of depression is instructive in terms of its view of human nature. 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.