Medicine's big new battleground: does mental illness really exist?

[napoleon_in_rags]

29. Biological factors.

Define some diseases but not others that we currently call diseases. For instance, with a cold a physical virus attacks your cells. With an infection, its a bacteria. With cancer, its a cell replication error. The medications target these, or the symptoms.

With other diseases, such as mental illness invoked by trauma, or with obesity, larger environmental factors are to blame. If you live in a setting where nothing but fast food is available, you will get obese. There is no pill for this, nothing a doctor can do: Your diet needs to change. Similarly, there's no pill to cure a once healthy mind that's been damaged by years of abuse, or the mind of a feral child, raised in isolation from humans. These "illnesses" are human minds reacting to real environmental situations, just like a human body reacts to a diet of junk by getting fat. So I think its really good to draw a line here: Yes there are diseased brains, some probably biologically... But assuming biological factors as a blanket strategy to treat "mental illness", when no biological factors can be shown in most cases just isn't good science.