Psychiatry’s Thirty-Five-Year, Non-Empirical Reach For Biological Explanations

Abstract

This is our third article in a series that began with a special issue of Behavior and Social Issues in 2006. Here we briefly review our central points from the first two articles. First is that over the past thirty-five years, claims of biological causation of mental and behavioral disorders have gone well beyond the research data, for reasons that are largely related to psychiatry's lost esteem and protection of its "turf," as well as to the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry. Our second position is that claims of psychotropic drugs' effectiveness have been overstated. We respond, as well, to the protestations of Professor Jerome C. Wakefield who defends biological psychiatry. We also provide an update on relevant events within the drug industry since our last article in this series. KEYWORDS: FDA, behaviorism, biological causation, pharmaceutical industry, organized psychiatry, efficacy of psychotropic medications, identical twin studies, brain imaging studies, psychological paradigms In this, our third paper in this exchange, we first reiterate what has taken place up to now. We and Stephen Wong (Wong, 2006; Wyatt & Midkiff, 2006) authored anchor papers in a special issue of Behavior and Social Issues (Mattaini, 2006). Our paper described the turn to biological explanations for mental and behavior disorders that has occurred in both the professional and popular cultures in the past thirty-five years. We also reviewed the non-empirical reasons for that turn. Those reasons included efforts by organized psychiatry (American Psychiatric Association) to recoup lost esteem and to rebuff "intruder" professions (clinical psychology, etc.), as well as the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry. All of this has occurred with the evident support of the American Medical Association. We refer the reader to that earlier article for a complete presentation of those issues.