From Psychobabble to Biobabble – Mental Illness and Medication Mind Candy

Medication for mental illness at the alarming rate it is being prescribed is nothing more than dangerous mind candy. Mind candy that cannot effectively address most challenges in mental illness. If one pathologizes mental illness in the narrow and rigid ways of psychiatry and its pseudo-science then one might want to fall in line with the illusion that pills are the long-sought after cure-all. However, they are not any cure-all whatsoever. When mental illness and its suffering are viewed from a different perspective it becomes much more clear that human beings do experience pain and suffering and that what is at issues is to what extent, and what can be done to help people to find balance and to find middle-ground from which they can find new ways to understand themselves and to find healing, growth, and transformative change.

The rise in the prescribing of medication by many in the psychiatric profession has turned psychobabble: “writing or talk using jargon from psychiatry or psychotherapy” (dictionary.com) into biobabble: “knee-jerk biological determinism” (Kathleen H. Dockett, G. Rita Dudley-Grant, and C. Peter Bankart – authors of the book, Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community (International and Cultural Psychology) What do you think? How can you find your way to effective and safe treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder or other forms of mental illness if you don’t stop to consider the pharmaceutical agenda that drives biobabble? Can you? Who do you believe? Are you aware of the shift in psychiatry from analysis to medication? What are the ramifications of this? On the line is the mental health and well-being of millions of people. Underneath it all what is the true quest – to treat and to cure or to make money?

According to the Polly Young-Eisendrath in the book, Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community (International and Cultural Psychology), “In the last two decades of the twentieth century, our popular and scientific accounts of human suffering have been inching their way toward a new form of scientific reductionism: a knee-jerk biological determinism that I call “biobabble,”

This is the widespread tendency to use terms (e.g. adaptation) that come from various aspects of the biological sciences to attempt to explain human actions and moods without even a reasonable understanding of the term, the science, the associated theory (or lack of it), and/or the target of explanation.

Biobabble names biological, evolutionary, and physical processes as the primary causes for many human traits and behaviors from the undesirable (like alcoholism and schizophrenia) to the sublime (like altruism and happiness). In my view, biobabble confuses and harms us in our attempts to understand and alleviate human suffering, on both an individual and a communal level.

By the term “suffering” here, I mean specifically the Buddhist notion of dukkha, which is typically translated as “suffering” in English. Dukkha literally refers to a state of being off-center or out-of-balance, like a bone slightly out of its socket or a wheel riding off its axle. I will use the word “suffering” to mean a state of being in which we are out of kilter because of a subjective disturbance that may be as mild as a momentary frustration or as severe as a depressive or psychotic state.”

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© A.J. Mahari, April 16, 2010 – Except where others are quoted as denoted above.

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