Here is an excerpt from a GREAT article by Jay Watts:
Psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty, relative inequality, being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering – as the survivor-led collective Recovery in the Bin brilliantly illuminates. Add into the mix individual experiences such as childhood sexual abuse, early separation, emotional neglect, chronic invalidation and bullying, and we get a clearer picture of why some people suffer more than others.
Crucially, all of these experiences affect our psychological and physiological makeup. For example, the Adverse Childhood Experiences studies show that childhood trauma, neglect and structural oppressions manifest later not just in mental distress but in chronically inflamed bodies stuck on hyper-alert (this we can pick up through blood tests).
Governments and pharmaceutical companies are not as interested in these results, throwing funding at studies looking at genetics and physical biomarkersas opposed to the environmental causes of distress. Sociologists argue that this is because citizens who consider themselves ill are easier to manage than people who consider themselves maddened by toxic families and injustice.
Mental health practitioners often try to sidestep this whole debate by claiming that most sensible professionals subscribe to a biopsychosocial model of mental distress. But unfortunately such a model nearly always ends up privileging the biological, despite the best intentions of many psychiatrists. As a society, we have a somewhat fetishistic relationship to bodies and brains, a moth-to-light-like attraction to shiny brain-imaging scans or a hint at a breakthrough in genetic research. Correlations between experiences and genetic phenotypes are conflated with evidence for molecular pathways that prove the existence of distinct disorders. Studies with only a few participants generate multiple headlines, and remain entrenched in the public imagination. At the same time, treatments that we know work fail to get funding due to the unconscious bias towards biological explanations.
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