Book Review: The Limits of Drug-Based Psychiatry

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July 8, 2022 – Take the chemical imbalance theory — as deeply embedded in the contemporary cultural firmament as Freud’s tripartite theory of the mind was a couple of generations ago — which posits that a serotonin deficiency can cause depression. Psychiatrist Steven Hyman, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who now directs a center for psychiatric research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, suggests that this idea is just marketing double-talk. As he explains to Bergner, “How people could think that mediocre — important, but mediocre — drugs like the SSRIs could give us any comprehension is beyond me. The logic is like saying, I have pain so I must have an aspirin deficiency.”

Likewise, Eric Nestler, a professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, and pharmacological sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, tells Bergner that it would be easy to argue that psychopharmacology has run into a dead-end, noting that “there hasn’t been a truly new mechanism for the treatment of any psychiatric disorder in over a half a century.”