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The depressing facts about “biologizing” psychiatry

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Here’s an interesting, longish item in New Atlantis (2014):

Together with the popular success of psychoactive medications like Prozac and Xanax, the change in the commitments of psychiatry has created ways of talking about mental illness that would have seemed outrageous or even nonsensical less than a century ago. Many of us now blithely accept that depression results from an imbalance of neurotransmitters. While the neurobiological understanding of mental disorders is still at a rudimentary stage, drugs that alter brain chemistry have definite palliative effects, and we increasingly look for and accept explanations of mental illness in neuroscientific terms. We might still take older explanations drawn from psychoanalysis or social psychiatry to hold some value, but we tend to assume that they can be reduced to neurobiology.

And how’s that working out?

Many patients find that antidepressants do not alleviate their depression, and some find that the drugs have no impact on their moods at all. A 2002 meta-analysis published in the journal Prevention and Treatment found that for six of the most prescribed antidepressants, placebo control groups matched 82 percent of the medication response. This situation led a 2014 article in Nature to claim that “five decades of work on antidepressant drugs have not made them more likely to lift people out of depression.” It has also led pharmaceutical companies to develop secondary drugs intended to enhance the effectiveness of antidepressants, with multi-drug treatment becoming more common.

Of course, the real story here is not that antidepressants never work but that the placebo effect is much more powerful than many suppose.

Despite the limited effectiveness of antidepressants and the theoretical gaps in understanding how they work, they have immensely shaped the theory and practice of psychiatry. The drugs provided clues to chemical processes involved in depression, which fueled attempts to formulate hypotheses for neurobiological causes of depression. These hypotheses were first formulated by looking at the biochemical effects of antidepressant drugs and attempting to infer the neurobiological abnormalities they were thought to fix.

But antidepressants were much more than an example of new technology changing the course of scientific research; they also helped widen the range of symptoms thought to be caused by depression. The Food and Drug Administration loosened restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertisements in the late 1990s, allowing pharmaceutical companies to run ads for antidepressants in national magazines, television shows, and elsewhere. Many of these advertisements limned the most general and benign symptoms included in the DSM’s criteria for depression (like irritability and fatigue) and their role in interpersonal problems and workplace difficulties, implicitly pushing the idea that drugs could relieve everyday human troubles. More.

One outcome that should concern us is the loss of a distinction between clinical depression (can’t go to work or maintain relationships for no clear reason) and specific or general unhappiness (friend dies, one realizes one will not attain life goals, etc.)

There is no cure for the human condition, after all. 😉

See also: Is there a good reason to believe that the human mind is and must bea fully natural object?

Comments
tabasco Your right. The soul could not possibly be affected in its moods by drugs. It isn't. The conclusions is that our soul is connected to our mind which , I conclude, is just a memory machine. So its only our memories or ratgher the triggering mechanism to our memory that gets us sad etc. So the drugs simply dope up this triggering mechanism. It is impossible for the soul to be affected in its thinking ability. Its not material. The bible is clear on this. So its the material mind that is only affectted. the mind is just a tool for the soul in thinking. Its just the memory. Depression is simply in a spectrum of phobias. Stuck memories.Robert Byers
March 23, 2015
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Aurelio Smith you state: "I didn’t mention consciousness, Phil. Like “intelligence” and “design”, the word “consciousness” has been tainted with extraneous implications that render useful discussion of the medical concept here counter-productive." Huh??? Counter-productive for whom? I can see where any discussion on consciousness, (intelligence and design), and from whence they come from would be 'counter-productive' for those who refuse to be dissuaded from their materialistic/atheistic religion! As for me, a Christian Theist, I am all for discussing the issue of consciousness, (intelligence and design), and from whence they come from. Question. Doesn't it seem just a little bit weird for you to be on a Intelligent Design website and refusing to honestly and openly discuss the issues of Intelligence and Design? Kind of defeats the whole purpose of being here doesn't it? If it upsets your sensibilities that much, perhaps you should go to a website that does not have 'Serving The Intelligent Design Community' in its header. Perhaps a site that states 'Serving those who do not want their atheistic/materialistic presuppositions challenged' in their header would be more to your liking? We wouldn't want to upset the molecules of your brain and make them sad now would we?!? If it makes you feel better, I finally have empirical proof that rocks can be sad: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2779/4366733762_036cbf79f7.jpgbornagain77
March 23, 2015
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Aurelio:
Like “intelligence” and “design”, the word “consciousness” has been tainted with extraneous implications that render useful discussion of the medical concept here counter-productive.
Tainted by the likes of you. So thanks for admitting that all you do is muddy the waters...Joe
March 23, 2015
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Moreover, brain trauma, contrary to what you claim, certainly does not prove that the brain can produce consciousness. In fact, it proves the exact opposite, i.e. that consciousness is not reducible to brain! In the following videos, although the girl in the videos was written off as hopelessly retarded by everyone who saw her, reveal that there was/is indeed a gentle intelligence, a “me”, a “soul’, within the girl that was/is trapped within her body. And that that “me” was/is unable to express herself properly to others because of her severe neurological disorder.
Severely Handicapped Girl Suddenly Expresses Intelligence At Age 11 – very moving video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNZVV4Ciccg Carly’s Café – Experience Autism Through Carly’s Eyes – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmDGvquzn2k The Case for the Soul - InspiringPhilosophy - (4:03 minute mark, Brain Plasticity including Schwartz's work) - Oct. 2014 - video The Mind is able to modify the brain (brain plasticity). Moreover, Idealism explains all anomalous evidence of personality changes due to brain injury, whereas physicalism cannot explain mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBsI_ay8K70
If the mind of a person were merely the brain, as materialists hold, then if half of a brain were removed then a 'person' should only be ‘half the person’, or at least somewhat less of a 'person', as they were before, but that is not the case. The ‘whole person’ stays intact even though the brain suffers severe impairment:
Miracle Of Mind-Brain Recovery Following Hemispherectomies - Dr. Ben Carson - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zBrY77mBNg Dr. Gary Mathern - What Can You Do With Half A Brain? - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrKijBx_hAw Removing Half of Brain Improves Young Epileptics' Lives: - 1997 Excerpt: "We are awed by the apparent retention of memory and by the retention of the child's personality and sense of humor,'' Dr. Eileen P. G. Vining,, Dr. John Freeman, the director of the Johns Hopkins Pediatric Epilepsy Center, said he was dumbfounded at the ability of children to regain speech after losing the half of the brain that is supposedly central to language processing. ''It's fascinating,'' Dr. Freeman said. ''The classic lore is that you can't change language after the age of 2 or 3.'' But Dr. Freeman's group has now removed diseased left hemispheres in more than 20 patients, including three 13-year-olds whose ability to speak transferred to the right side of the brain in much the way that Alex's did.,,, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/19/science/removing-half-of-brain-improves-young-epileptics-lives.html
In further comment from the neuro-surgeons in the John Hopkins study:
"Despite removal of one hemisphere, the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved. Intellect was only affected in the one child who had remained in a coma, vigil-like state, attributable to peri-operative complications." Strange but True: When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One - May 2007 Excerpt: Most Hopkins hemispherectomy patients are five to 10 years old. Neurosurgeons have performed the operation on children as young as three months old. Astonishingly, memory and personality develop normally. ,,, Another study found that children that underwent hemispherectomies often improved academically once their seizures stopped. "One was champion bowler of her class, one was chess champion of his state, and others are in college doing very nicely," Freeman says. Of course, the operation has its downside: "You can walk, run—some dance or skip—but you lose use of the hand opposite of the hemisphere that was removed. You have little function in that arm and vision on that side is lost," Freeman says. Remarkably, few other impacts are seen. ,,, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-when-half-brain-better-than-whole
You also claim that psychotropic, mood altering, drugs prove that the brain can produce consciousness. That claim is even more preposterous than your previous claims. As I asked tabasco at 11:
Why are ‘you’ not very surprised? ‘I’ would be very surprised to learn that atoms bumping into each other could be depressed? What are they depressed about? Are some of the atoms unloving in the way they bump into other atoms and the other atoms are unhappy about it? Do antidepressants make all the atoms do a happy dance? Whereas ‘I’, as a soul who lives in a material body, can easily see that if my house, i.e. my body, were not functioning properly that would make ‘me’, the soul who is living in that house, unhappy?
Verse and Music:
Mark 8:36-37 What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? James Brown-I'm a soul man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgcq8klGQsQ
bornagain77
March 23, 2015
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Aurelio Smith you claim that anesthesia proves the brain, all by its lonesome, can produce consciousness? I'm sure Stuart Hameroff, who is an Anesthesiologist, and who recently had preliminary confirmation of his and Penrose's Orch OR model for consciousness, would be very surprised to learn that.
Quantum Entangled Consciousness - Life After Death - Stuart Hameroff - video https://vimeo.com/39982578 ,,, zero time lag neuronal synchrony despite long conduction delays - 2008 Excerpt: Multielectrode recordings have revealed zero time lag synchronization among remote cerebral cortical areas. However, the axonal conduction delays among such distant regions can amount to several tens of milliseconds. It is still unclear which mechanism is giving rise to isochronous discharge of widely distributed neurons, despite such latencies,,, Remarkably, synchrony of neuronal activity is not limited to short-range interactions within a cortical patch. Interareal synchronization across cortical regions including interhemispheric areas has been observed in several tasks (7, 9, 11–14).,,, Beyond its functional relevance, the zero time lag synchrony among such distant neuronal ensembles must be established by mechanisms that are able to compensate for the delays involved in the neuronal communication. Latencies in conducting nerve impulses down axonal processes can amount to delays of several tens of milliseconds between the generation of a spike in a presynaptic cell and the elicitation of a postsynaptic potential (16). The question is how, despite such temporal delays, the reciprocal interactions between two brain regions can lead to the associated neural populations to fire in unison (i.e. zero time lag).,,, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575223/
The following paper appeals to a ‘non-local’, (i.e. beyond space and time), cause to try to explain the synchronization in neural circuits,,,
Nonlocal mechanism for cluster synchronization in neural circuits – 2011 Excerpt: The findings,,, call for reexamining sources of correlated activity in cortex,,, http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3634
In the 'Quantum Entangled Consciousness' video I cited, Hameroff states that when quantum entanglement/information is lost in the brain upon death that the quantum entanglement/information will continue to exist elsewhere in the universe. Here is evidence to that effect. In other words, here is evidence that quantum information is in fact ‘conserved’;,,,
Quantum no-hiding theorem experimentally confirmed for first time Excerpt: In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed. This concept stems from two fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics: the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem. A third and related theorem, called the no-hiding theorem, addresses information loss in the quantum world. According to the no-hiding theorem, if information is missing from one system (which may happen when the system interacts with the environment), then the information is simply residing somewhere else in the Universe; in other words, the missing information cannot be hidden in the correlations between a system and its environment. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-quantum-no-hiding-theorem-experimentally.html Quantum no-deleting theorem Excerpt: A stronger version of the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem provide permanence to quantum information. To create a copy one must import the information from some part of the universe and to delete a state one needs to export it to another part of the universe where it will continue to exist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_no-deleting_theorem#Consequence
Here is the evidence that offered preliminary confirmation of Penrose/Hameroff's Orch OR model of consciousness:
Evidence for Quantum Consciousness - video Excerpt: Fascinating new study. The chemical anesthetic 1-azidoanthracine was administered to tadpoles and found to work by disrupting microtubules in the nervous system. A second chemical which repaired the microtubules was found to restore consciousness. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wxtzpp4Gts
And further confirmation is here:
New Study Favors Quantum Mind - Quantum coherence in brain protein resembles plant photosynthesis - 18-Sep-2014 Excerpt: Photosynthesis, the ubiquitous and essential mechanism by which plants produce food from sunlight, has been shown since 2006 to routinely utilize quantum coherence (quantum coherent superposition) at warm temperatures.,,, Back in the brain, microtubules are components of the cytoskeleton inside neurons, cylindrical lattice polymers of the protein ‘tubulin’.,,, now it appears quantum mechanisms eerily similar to those in photosynthesis may operate in tubulins within microtubules. In an article published September 17,, a team of scientists,, used computer simulation and theoretical quantum biophysics to analyze quantum coherence among tryptophan pi resonance rings in tubulin, the component protein in microtubules.,,, (They) mapped locations of the tryptophan pi electron resonance clouds in tubulin, and found them analogous to (the quantum coherent superposition of) chromophores in photosynthesis proteins.,,, http://www.newswise.com/articles/new-study-favors-quantum-mind#.VBusnOKcVcM.google_plusone_share On consciousness, Tegmark gets one thing right, says Rob Sheldon - January 19, 2014 Excerpt: Orch OR was harshly criticized from its inception, as the brain was considered too “warm, wet, and noisy” for seemingly delicate quantum processes.. However, evidence has now shown warm quantum coherence in plant photosynthesis, bird brain navigation, our sense of smell, and brain microtubules. The recent discovery of warm temperature quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons by the research group led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay, PhD, at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan (and now at MIT), corroborates the pair’s theory and suggests that EEG rhythms also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations. In addition, work from the laboratory of Roderick G. Eckenhoff, MD, at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that anesthesia, which selectively erases consciousness while sparing non-conscious brain activities, acts via microtubules in brain neurons.,,, https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/on-consciousness-tegmark-gets-one-thing-right-says-rob-sheldon/
bornagain77
March 23, 2015
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Piotr: (1) A mind does not exist without a brain.
You don't know that.
Piotr: (2) A brain is a physical (“material”) system in which physical/chemical processes take place.
Yes
Piotr: (3) If you interfere with those processes (by drinking a few pints, for example), mental activity is affected as well.
Correlation is not causation
Piotr: (4) If those processes stop, mental activity stops as well.
You don't know that.
Piotr: (5) Given all that, the most reasonable hypothesis is that the mind is a product of those processes.
Absolutely wrong.
Piotr: The argument “but matter can’t think” is not valid if the brain is exactly the type of material structure that can think.
True. But only true in the sense that the argument “a triangle is not a square" is not valid if a triangle is exactly the type of thing that is square. However a triangle is not a square and matter doesn't think.
Piotr: If thinking is the property of this kind of sufficiently complex information-processing system, you can’t demand that individual molecules should be conscious in some rudimentary way.
Yes I can. If A is claimed to produce logic, truth, wisdom and the like, I have the perfect right to demand of A that it is at the very least interested and motivated to produce these things. However we all know that particles in motion don't give a hoot about logic, truth, wisdom and the like. Consequently particles in motion are not a sufficient cause for thinking and the mind.Box
March 23, 2015
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There is a huge difference between arguing something and providing evidence for it.Joe
March 23, 2015
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You don’t know that. For one thing you have to discard all NDE testimonies.
I think it has already been argued that reliable NDE testimonies are consistent with mundane explanations (incomplete anaesthesia etc.). Some NDE testimonies (circulated on the Internet and in pseudoscientific publications) are rather evidently made up. I'm not going to whip this dead horse in another thread.Piotr
March 23, 2015
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Aurelio Smith refuses to support its claims. TypicalJoe
March 23, 2015
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#14 There's a world of difference between (1) an untypically small brain or a cortex flattened by hydrocephalus, and (2) no brain at all. We don't know how serious the reduction was. Lorber himself wasn't sure and may have exaggerated it (his work on the case has never been properly published, as far as I know). All it shows is that the brain can function pretty normally in very unusual conditions.Piotr
March 23, 2015
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follow up #14 I have linked to a youtube documentary, but unfortunately - although it seems relevant - it's not the documentary I hoped it was. :(Box
March 23, 2015
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I have read this sentence 3 times, but it is simply not coherent – the conclusion you start off with doesn’t follow.
I'll write slowly, so that you can follow: (1) A mind does not exist without a brain. (2) A brain is a physical ("material") system in which physical/chemical processes take place. (3) If you interfere with those processes (by drinking a few pints, for example), mental activity is affected as well. (4) If those processes stop, mental activity stops as well. (5) Given all that, the most reasonable hypothesis is that the mind is a product of those processes. The argument "but matter can't think" is not valid if the brain is exactly the type of material structure that can think. If thinking is the property of this kind of sufficiently complex information-processing system, you can't demand that individual molecules should be conscious in some rudimentary way. Who knows, they might be, but I'm agnostic about that part, since we have no good theory of consciousness as yet. Dualism is a non-explanation.Piotr
March 23, 2015
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Anaesthesia, brain trauma, psychotropic substances, all confirm that the mind is what the brain does.
They do?? Evidence please. What is the evidence that the mind or brain can be reduced to physics and chemistry?Joe
March 23, 2015
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Piotr: I bet you have a brain, Box, but correct me if you are a freely floating disincarnate consciousness or if your brainpan is an air-filled cavity
Some decades ago, I do not remember when exactly, I saw a BBC documentairy about people ‘without a brain’, who did function normally. Unfortunately I have not been able to find it. But I did find this http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf From the pdf file:
"There's a young student at this university," says [professor] Lorber, "who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain." “I can't say whether the mathematics student has a brain weighing 50 grams or 150 grams, but it's clear that it is nowhere near the normal 1.5 kilo-grams," asserts Lorber, "and much of the brain he does have is in the more primitive deep structures that are relatively spared in hydrocephalus."
1% Piotr ... Unfortunately I cannot find any further confirmation of this incredible story. edit: I just found out that the Lorber BBC doc is at youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSlBVoy_ZOgBox
March 23, 2015
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How do antidepressants reduce the soul’s sadness?
Please demonstrate that souls get sad.Joe
March 23, 2015
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as to: "If our minds are physical phenomena, (i.e. particles in motion), as I believe, then it isn’t surprising that our moods can be altered by drugs." Why are 'you' not very surprised? 'I' would be very surprised to learn that atoms bumping into each other could be depressed? What are they depressed about? Are some of the atoms unloving in the way they bump into other atoms and the other atoms are unhappy about it? Do antidepressants make all the atoms do a happy dance? Whereas 'I', as a soul who lives in a material body, can easily see that if my house, i.e. my body, were not functioning properly that would make 'me', the soul who is living in that house, unhappy? In materialism, you simply have no way to account for subjective experience! If you have empirical evidence to the contrary, your Nobel prize awaits!
‘But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can’t even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don’t even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run.’ David Barash – Materialist/Atheist Darwinian Psychologist “We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good.” Matthew D. Lieberman – neuroscientist – materialist – UCLA professor There is simply no direct evidence that anything material is capable of generating consciousness. As Rutgers University philosopher Jerry Fodor says, "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness. Regardless of our knowledge of the structure of the brain, no one has any idea how the brain could possibly generate conscious experience." As Nobel neurophysiologist Roger Sperry wrote, "Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature." From modern physics, Nobel prize-winner Eugene Wigner agreed: "We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physio-chemical processes with the state of mind." Contemporary physicist Nick Herbert states, "Science's biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot." Physician and author Larry Dossey wrote: "No experiment has ever demonstrated the genesis of consciousness from matter. One might as well believe that rabbits emerge from magicians' hats. Yet this vaporous possibility, this neuro-mythology, has enchanted generations of gullible scientists, in spite of the fact that there is not a shred of direct evidence to support it." http://www.merkawah.nl/public_html/images/stories/ccvsgwrepr.pdf Mind and Cosmos – Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False – Thomas Nagel Excerpt: If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199919758.do
bornagain77
March 23, 2015
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Piotr: Minds don't exist without a central nervous system.
You don't know that. For one thing you have to discard all NDE testimonies.
Piotr: Apparently matter can think and be conscious, since brains are material and minds don’t exist without a central nervous system.
I have read this sentence 3 times, but it is simply not coherent - the conclusion you start off with doesn't follow.
Piotr: How do you explain the correlation, then?
Dualism is one option.Box
March 23, 2015
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Box, You are missing another obvious thing. Apparently matter can think and be conscious, since brains are material and minds don't exist without a central nervous system (I bet you have a brain, Box, but correct me if you are a freely floating disincarnate consciousness or if your brainpan is an air-filled cavity).
Correlation does not imply causation
How do you explain the correlation, then?Piotr
March 23, 2015
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Tabasco: I’ve already pondered the question, and I’ve concluded that non-physical souls don’t exist. If our minds are physical phenomena, as I believe, (...)
Aha! During your deliberations you must have missed that this is obviously not possible. Our minds cannot be physical phenomena because matter can neither think nor be conscious. Yes, it really is that simple ... If blind particles in motion are in the driver's seat we cannot possibly expect to be able to think. That is, we all know that particles in motion don't give a hoot about logic, truth, overview, wisdom and the like. So no, that's simply not an option Tabasco.
Tabasco: (...) then it isn’t surprising that our moods can be altered by drugs.
Correlation does not imply causation. Besides our minds also influence matter in return - every post on this forum testifies to that fact. How? Well maybe that influence is constituted on quantum level.Box
March 23, 2015
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Box @ 5 - can you be more specific? That's a long page, and doesn't mention anti-depressants.Bob O'H
March 23, 2015
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Box, I've already pondered the question, and I've concluded that non-physical souls don't exist. If our minds are physical phenomena, as I believe, then it isn't surprising that our moods can be altered by drugs. However, I'm curious to know how those who do believe in non-physical souls would answer my question.tabasco
March 23, 2015
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Tabasco #4, Very good of you Tabasco. Don't Be Afraid to Ask Questions! He who asks a question remains a fool for five minutes - Chinese proverb. This may be a good place to start your search.Box
March 23, 2015
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Question for those who believe in a non-physical soul: How do antidepressants reduce the soul's sadness?tabasco
March 22, 2015
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i think anti-depressents are a great medical invention. Thats why they are popular. They work as people give witness. in reality they are a controlled buzz from booze. That is they, as I see it, very simnly interfere with the memory system. I think they interfere with the triggering mechanism of the memory. Depression is simply a memory that is dominating someone. Thats why the difference between life depressions and clincal is non existent. Its just better or worse. There is no mental illness but only memory illness. Sure thats true. Anti's just paralysis the memory system. Just like booze..Robert Byers
March 22, 2015
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This still leaves unexplained the strong correlation between depression and low serotonin levels in the brain. I realize there is much to figure out about the placebo effect, but the correlations we discover about various neurotransmitters and behavior/emotion have to have some significance. (On a lighter note, I think placebos are great. I take 8 of them every day and I never felt better! 8-)EDTA
March 22, 2015
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One useful aspect about 'biologizing' psychiatry is that patients with, for example clinical depression, who have a biochemical disorder should not be made to feel that their illness is their fault because they are not thinking rightly.Jim Smith
March 22, 2015
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