Thoughts Toward a Critique of Biological Psychiatry

Abstract

Biological psychiatry is now the dominant paradigm in psychiatry, so much so that to use the term “psychiatry” at the beginning of the twenty-first century is often to mean “biological psychiatry.” With the abandonment of mind-based therapies and explanations to psychotherapists, who increasingly are clinical psychologists and social workers, psychiatry—the discipline historically straddling the mind-brain split in medicine—has come down firmly on the side of brain, with strict biological reductivism as its explanatory model. Axiomatically, mind events are reducible to, or at least entirely mappable onto, brain events with nothing left over to explain. This does not mean that mental phenomena are “caused” by prior biological events (a Cartesian dualist position), but rather that there is no difference between the two. There are not two events—a body event followed by a mind event or vice versa—just one, though it is capable of many kinds of description.