A critique of the scientific status of biological psychiatry

Abstract

Biological psychiatry has four principal modes of investigation but each has been flawed by errors in procedure and inference such that the bulk of existing findings must be called into question. Pedigree studies are ruined by selective adoption, the use of "throw-away kids" to demonstrate so-called genetic effects, lack of case history data, and lapses in "blind" diagnosis. In particular, the Danish adoption studies are challenged, despite the field's insistence that this research has settled the nature-nurture controversy in schizophrenia. Pharmacological-response studies are the next line of methodology and these are marred by a spurious assumption that drugs which work must be correcting a biochemical imbalance that causes the condition. Thirdly, neuropsychological-neurophysiological studies are "heuristic" fishing-expeditions to find a presumed abnormality to account for psychopathology, without doing the prospective longitudinal research necessary to validate such theory. Lastly, biochemical correlates of emotion are treated as if each emotion must have a distinct neuronal substrate rather than possibly representing a general visceral arousal where cognition defines the feeling. All told, biological psychiatry is often more reductionist than acknowledged, does not come up to current scientific standards, and uncritically cites work which is, or should be, discredited. At the heart of the problem is an implicit ideology within biological psychiatry, with insufficient awareness of its social ramifications: "blaming the victim's body" protects the status quo by holding protoplasm at fault for maladjustment rather than the person, family, or community.

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