The “Chemical Imbalance” Hoax

From cradle to the grave, we are bombarded with information pushing us towards a chemical “fix.” But let’s take a closer look at some very important aspects of this new psychoactive, drug-centered philosophy.

Psychiatrists claim that a person “needs” a drug to combat their “chemical imbalance” in the brain which is causing a person’s “mental disorder.” However, the concept that a brain-based, chemical imbalance underlies mental illness is false. While popularized by heavy public marketing, it is simply psychiatric wishful thinking. As with all of psychiatry’s disease models, it has been thoroughly discredited by researchers.

Diabetes is a biochemical imbalance. However, as Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen states, “the definitive test and biochemical imbalance is a high blood sugar balance level. Treatment in severe cases is insulin injections, which restore sugar balance. The symptoms clear and retest shows the blood sugar is normal. Nothing like a sodium imbalance or blood sugar imbalance exists for depression or any other psychiatric syndrome.”

In 1996, psychiatrist David Kaiser said, “...modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness…Patients [have] been diagnosed with ‘chemical imbalances’ despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and…there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.”

Today’s brain imagery photos, said to prove mental illnesses are physical diseases, are deeply flawed. Indeed, prescribed psychotropic drugs most likely cause the changes seen in the brain. Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, admits that indiscriminate use of such brain scans produce “pretty but inconsequential pictures of the brain.”

Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D., author of Blaming the Brain, is unequivocal: “[T]here are no tests available for assessing the chemical status of a living person’s brain.” No “biochemical, anatomical, or functional signs have been found that reliably distinguish the brains of mental patients.”

According to Valenstein, “The theories are held on to not only because there is nothing else to take their place, but also because they are useful in promoting drug treatment.”  Masquerading as the science of mental health requires that certain appearances be maintained. It was German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin who, in the 1800s, first worked on a system of codification of human behavior, while simultaneously acknowledging that psychiatry had no effective treatments or cures for psychiatric disorders.

Since Kraepelin, the number of psychiatric condemnations of human behavior has steadily expanded. Today, they are codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), Mental Disorders Section. First published in 1952 with a list of 112 maladies, the 1994 issue of DSM specifies more than 370 disorders.