Biopsychiatry controversy

Background
The biopsychiatry controversy is an ongoing dispute over the scientific basis of biological psychiatry theory and practice. The debate is focused on criticism of mainstream psychiatric thinking, proposed by a vocal minority of psychiatrists, scientists and the Psychiatric survivors movement. These critics of mainstream psychiatry contend the field is flawed in a number of ways. they argue that the lack of biomarkers is a flaw in the evidence for a somatic, biological cause for mental illness. Instead they draw attention to trauma models of mental disorders within the psychiatric literature which have been marginalized as research efforts switched to the biological model since the 1980s.

Overview
After a century of medical progress different specialties of medicine have developed therapeutic practices that have made illnesses more treatable and eradicable. Biological psychiatry or biopsychiatry aims to investigate determinants of mental disorders devising remedial somatic measures.

An organization critical of biopsychiatry, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, points out that the dominant reductionist approach postulates somatic variables as causative factors in mental disorders. Consequently, research in biopsychiatry is confined to the medical illness model. Clinical professor of psychiatry, Alvin Pam, describes this as a "stilted, unidimensional, and mechanistic world-view" and subsequently "research in psychiatry has been geared toward discovering which aberrant genetic or neurophysiological factors underlie and cause social deviance". According to Pam the "blame the body" approach, which typically offers medication for mental distress, shifts the focus from disturbed behavior in the family to putative biochemical imbalances.

History
In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault contends that the psychiatric profession originated in the 17th century as a method of bypassing legal restraints on the incarceration of poor people. State asylums, within which the profession originated, were basically lockups for the homeless. The medical profession took over the poor houses in the 19th century. Sigmund Freud was one of the first well known psychiatrists.

By the 1930s the giant lockups of psychiatric hospitals had become too large and unmanageable. Lobotomy and various shock treatments were developed. In the 1950s new drugs were developed for tranquilizing the inmates.

Elliot Valenstein claims that, in the popular imagination molded by the media, biopsychiatry has become more scientific recently; has many effective drugs, has demonstrated the genetic foundation of schizophrenia and is moving ever forward into more specific psychopharmacology. However, in contrast to brain diseases such as tumors, multiple sclerosis, meningitis, epilepsy or neurosyphilis, after more than a century biopsychiatrists have not demonstrated that the major disorders that they diagnose are related to brain lesions. What is popularly known as the "Bible" of the psychiatric profession, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM does not assert the existence of biomarkers for the list of DSM behaviors. In the words of psychiatrist and veteran critic of his own profession Thomas Szasz:

The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud were not what they claimed or seem to be — namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense.

Szasz's concern is that a specialty in which the Virchowian, or cell pathology, criterion of disease or illness has been abandoned may drive societies into what he calls political medicine or the Therapeutic State.

Lack of biomarkers
One of the paradigms of biopsychiatry, the concept of schizophrenia, has been challenged from various perspectives. Shannon Sumrall and others contend that despite media publicity it has yet to be proven that schizophrenia is a bio-medical condition. More significantly, the traumatogenic cause of some types of schizophrenia has been considered by some as a revolutionary approach in the mental health field.

The fourth edition of the DSM is a list of 374 conditions. Only two of them, Post-traumatic stress disorder and Dissociative identity disorder are thought to be psychogenic or caused by traumatic experiences. Biopsychiatrists maintain that many other disorders are biomedical entities of unknown etiology. For example, in a statement released in September 2003 the American Psychiatric Association, which represents 36,000 physician leaders in mental health, conceded that

Brain science has not advanced to the point where scientists or clinicians can point to readily discernible pathologic lesions or genetic abnormalities that in and of themselves serve as reliable or predictive biomarkers of a given mental disorder or mental disorders as a group […]. Mental disorders will likely be proven to represent disorders of intracellular communication; or of disrupted neural circuitry.

Psychiatrist Duncan B. Double criticizes the futuristic stance "will likely be proven..." in this field. In the psychiatric profession, people labeled with a DSM disorder are usually treated with psychiatric drugs, and occasionally, electroshock. Hence the lack of biological markers in the profession has been an issue of concern for Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America. Children might be especially susceptible to the neuroleptics' side effects.

Unjustified focus on biochemical factors
Most biopsychiatrists believe that, among other factors, the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain is a biological regulator of mental health. In this theory, emotions within a "normal" spectrum reflect a proper balance of neurochemicals, but abnormally extreme emotions, such as clinical depression, reflect an imbalance. Psychiatrists claim that medications regulate neurotransmitters and also claim they treat abnormal personalities by removing a neurochemical excess or replenishing a deficit (though the efficacy of antidepressants and antipsychotics is not undisputed ). On the other hand, Elliot Valenstein, a psychologist and neuroscientist, claims that the broad biochemical assertions and assumptions of mainstream psychiatry are not supported by evidence.

Critics suggest mainstream psychiatry theory is influenced by pharmaceutical companies' sales and marketing departments. Richard Smith (former editor of the British Medical Journal) wrote about how the drug industry can subtly influence what is published in the scholarly literature. He said, "I must confess that it took me almost a quarter of a century editing for the BMJ to wake up to what was happening."

Studies have shown that, for reasons unknown, the outcome for people diagnosed with schizophrenia in non-Western countries may actually be much better than for people in the West. In Mad in America, Whitaker postulates that the explanation for this situation is the iatrogenic effect of neuroleptics, too expensive for poor countries but easily available in rich countries.

Unjustified focus on genetic factors
According to biopsychiatry, genetic and environmental factors both appear to be of vital importance in determining mental state and therefore certain genetic factors can predispose people to particular mental illnesses. To date — and in contrast to diseases affecting almost every other human organ but the brain — only a few genetic lesions have been proposed to be mechanistically responsible for psychiatric conditions. One reported finding suggests that in persons diagnosed as schizophrenic as well as in their relatives with chronic psychiatric illnesses, the gene that encodes phosphodiesterase 4B (PDE4B) is disrupted by a balanced translocation. There are reports of significant associations between specific genomic regions and psychiatric disorders.

The reasons offered for the relative lack of genetic understanding is because the links between genes and mental states defined as abnormal appear highly complex, involve extensive environmental influences and can be mediated in numerous different ways, for example by personality, temperament or life events. Therefore while twin studies and other research suggests that personality is heritable to some extent, the genetic basis for particular personality or temperament traits, and their links to mental health problems, is currently unclear.

Theodore Lidz , Jay Joseph (2003, 2006 ) and others argue that biopsychiatrists use genetic terminology in an unscientific way to reinforce their approach, for example by referring to findings of the genetic basis for illnesses and weaknesses, rather than the role of other factors which may make some problems more likely in some environments and societies. Some propose that the biochemical differences observed in some mental illnesses are not the genetic cause, but rather the effect of a condition caused solely by psychological trauma. Others argue that there is no significant genetic component involved at all, suggesting instead that observed patterns of family transmission are neutral with respect to genetic versus environmental etiology. Lidz and Joseph maintain that biopsychiatrists disproportionately focus on understanding the genetics of those individuals with mental health problems at the expense of addressing the problems of the living in the environments of some extremely abusive families or societies.

Imaging techniques
Modern brain imaging techniques, PET, MRI and CT scans are widely used in the medical profession. However, despite media publicity in the professional medical literature the potential value of imaging data for detecting genuine brain lesions is not undisputed. For example, blood perfusion that can be seen with the imaging techniques is not considered a biomarker in the medical profession. In neurological science a biomarker could be physiopathology, histopathology or the presence of pathogen microorganisms in the nervous system. Biopsychiatrists recognize that they cannot demonstrate any of these biomarkers in the major DSM disorders (Nancy C. Andreasen, 2004).

Biopsychiatry as a pseudo-science
Many of the above issues lead to the common claim that psychiatry is a pseudo-science . According to the generally-accepted philosophy of science, for a theory to qualify as hard science it needs to exhibit the following characteristics:


 * parsimony, as straightforward as the phenomena to be explained allow (see Occam's Razor);
 * empirically testable and falsifiable (see Falsifiability);
 * changeable, i.e. if necessary, changes may be made to the theory as new data are discovered;
 * progressive, encompasses previous successful descriptions and explains and adds more;
 * provisional, i.e. tentative; the theory does not attempt to assert that it is a final description or explanation.

Psychiatrist Colin A. Ross and Alvin Pam maintain that biopsychiatry does not qualify as a science on many counts.

A self-taught survivor of the mental health system who believes schizophrenia is caused by early childhood abuse, John Modrow, believes that most biological hypotheses in psychiatry are untestable and unfalsifiable. Beyond the invasiveness and destructiveness of some testing, he justifies his claim by asserting that existing medical tests are not able to differentiate between those structural and neurochemical differences which cause psychiatric disease, and those changes which are simply the result.