Today, when one looks at modern psychiatry, attends its conferences, reads its journals, it is biologic psychiatry that one sees. Biologic psychiatry has been openly ambitious about overthrowing the reign of psychoanalysis, and it has succeeded with startling speed by wedding itself to technology, modern medicine, the pharmaceutical industry and managed care corporations. Any observer of psychiatry is forced to conclude that biologic psychiatry now completely dominates the field at the research, educational and clinical levels. My reading of this question is that there is a specific, largely unacknowledged interpretation of human nature underlying biologic psychiatry, whose core tenets consist of a narrow biologic determinism, a mechanistic view of the mind, and very simple and false notions of cause and effect. It would take a book to illustrate these points fully, but I can briefly outline my position by the example of how biologic psychiatry now views depression.
Depression is no longer a state or mood but is now an illness called major depression .
The treatment is to correct the chemical imbalance with medications and only secondarily to try to remove the precipitating stress. When the symptoms of depression subside, the illness is then in remission. Although this may sound like a parody, it is unfortunately how modern or biologic psychiatry now views depression. I want to emphasize that the above is a story, or construction, about depression. None of the assertions made in it or the links between assertions have been proven.