Researchers Doubt That Certain Mental Disorders Are Disorders At All

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 05:58:57 +1100

Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>

Andrew Pam
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisonescalante/2020/08/11/researchers-doubt-that-certain-mental-disorders-are-disorders-at-all/>

"What if mental disorders like anxiety, depression or post-traumatic
stress disorder aren’t mental disorders at all? In a compelling new
paper, biological anthropologists call on the scientific community to
rethink mental illness. With a thorough review of the evidence, they
show good reasons to think of depression or PTSD as responses to
adversity rather than chemical imbalances. And ADHD could be a way of
functioning that evolved in an ancestral environment, but doesn’t match
the way we live today."

Via Muse, who wrote "I’ve been saying this for awhile:"

Study author Kristen Syme, a recent WSU Ph.D. graduate, compares
treating anxiety, depression or PTSD with antidepressants to
medicating someone for a broken bone without setting the bone itself.
She believes that these problems “look more like sociocultural
phenomena, so the solution is not necessarily fixing a dysfunction in
the person’s brain but fixing dysfunctions in the social world.”

Cheers,
        *** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net               Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/                 Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/            Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/               Manager, Serious Cybernetics

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