The Myth of the Chemical Imbalance

Walk into most psychology discussions and you'll run into one idea more than any other, and it comes straight out of psychiatry. The idea is that whatever people are suffering through, depression, anxiety, bipolar swings, is really a chemistry problem in the brain gone wrong. Push hard enough on the question and even the American Psychological Association will concede the point. The trouble is that we live in a profit-driven country, and the money follows demand. As long as people keep wanting a medical label and a prescription to match it, there will be an industry happy to feed those thought patterns right back to them.

The person who has actually spent time on their own growth tends to see through this. They might take something for a while to steady the ground under their feet, but privately they already suspect there is nothing broken in them. The fight happens in the mind, and winning it means learning to run your own mind instead of being run by it. Medicine and therapy have their place in getting better, that much is fair. Still, be honest about the incentives: almost nothing in the current setup pushes a person to climb out of the struggle. Qualify for a mental condition and you can draw Social Security disability. SSI can bring free housing and healthcare on the grounds that you're too impaired to hold a job. Put in the ten years of work history that Social Security requires and the payout scales with what you once earned. So where, exactly, is the reward for conquering your "chemical imbalance"?

The only thing that reliably moves someone toward recovery is a private decision to grow, to keep developing as a person. A full life comes from actually knowing yourself and figuring out what you specifically have to give. Western culture leans on allopathic medicine, which tends to treat mind and body as two separate machines, so this kind of knowledge doesn't get handed to you. You pick it up only if you go looking, because a market society will happily keep your illusions well fed for a price. Getting past that means being willing to walk against traffic and backing yourself while you do it.

Most of the people working inside psychology and psychiatry understand this perfectly well. They're grateful for the work, and I'd guess more than a few feel uneasy imagining what a mass awakening of consciousness would do to the profession they chose. The paycheck isn't for curing you, though. What they hand you are tools. Picking them up and walking the path of growth, into the fuller life you already sense you're supposed to be living, that part falls to you. If you can't manage it, it's usually because some corner of your mind still buys the story the world keeps selling, that money and success matter more than the slow work of sitting with yourself.

None of this is easy. Going against what everyone around you assumes takes real nerve. A lot of what gets filed under bipolar illness today is, underneath, plain anxiety and other fears wearing a diagnosis. People avoid the inner work because the prospect of meeting themselves frightens them. Live in that fear long enough and it starts leaking out as physical and mental trouble, the sort of thing that then gets named a chemical imbalance.

A person's emotional life is where their spiritual life sits. Growing spiritually and personally is the same motion as raising your emotional intelligence, getting more fluent in what you actually feel. Higher EI means a higher level of awareness, and at that level your thoughts stop being your boss. Once the mind-body link clicks into place you won't really have a choice about any of this, because the "take it for life" prescriptions quit working on a person who has seen through them. From there you have to lean on whatever growth and self-development is in front of you and learn to steer your own mind. That's when the genuinely good life shows up, the prosperity and the well-being, because the moment you've mastered the mind the struggle is more or less finished.

Life isn't really the monster it's made out to be. The fight simply begins between your ears. Human beings got by for thousands of years before modern pharmacology existed. A profit-seeking culture just pays out on your distorted thinking by making money off it. Taking hold of your own thought life is on you: do the self-development, do the growth, learn to even out your own brain chemistry.

Erwin Wooten, The Daily E Blog.

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