Content area
Full Text
Blaming the Brain: The Truth about Drugs and Mental Health
By Elliot S. Valenstein. NewYork:The Free Press, 1998, 292 pp.; $25.00
For all the fusillades in the drug war and all the moaning about the drug culture, middle class Americans have come to believe in a medicinal approach to all forms of psychological maladjustments. Over the last decade many have become convinced that psychological problems are fundamentally chemical problems. As the new dogma has it, just as the symptoms of the diabetic are a result of low insulin levels so is the funk of the depressive a function of low serotonin levels. As a result of the triumph of the psychopharmaceutic, intensive psychotherapy has become a thing of the past for all but the very wealthy Psychiatrists have been reduced to pill pushing and now receive little or no training in the fading art of talk therapy. How exactly did we go from understanding mental illness in terms of dynamic forces to understanding it according to the shibboleth "chemical imbalance?"
In his Blaming the Brain, Elliot Valenstein, the University of Michigan neuroscientist, takes us back through the process in which we talked ourselves into the biochemical credo. It would be comforting to believe that the new public trust in psychotropic drugs was simply a reaction to breakthroughs in neuroscience and as such was based upon solid evidence to the effect that our psychological states can best be understood in molecular terms. This, however, is a comfort that Valenstein's book will not entirely allow us, for while he acknowledges progress in our understanding of the brain he shows that the 180-degree turn towards pharmaceutical solutions is more indicative of the increasing influence of drug companies than it is a reflection of neuroscientific discoveries.
Valenstein begins with a history of the ascendance of pharmaceutical psychiatry. He notes that it is only in the last forty years that psychiatrists have come to consider medication a viable treatment option. Until the late 1950s, the preferred modes of treatment were shock therapy and psychoanalysis. At that time, the only drugs widely used in psychiatric settings were barbiturates, insulin, and Metrazol. Barbiturates were, of course, used to calm the frothing seas of agitated states but also to induce "sleep therapy;" a...