Complementary and Alternative Mental Health Requires More Honesty

Jonathan Prousky

Mainstream psychiatry is hell-bent on promoting the notion that psychiatric disorders are brain disorders. The new push from the National Institute of Mental Health is that mental illness may be more of a neuronal connection or circuit disorder.¹ The NIMH apparently hopes to shift attention away from the erroneous and unproven biochemical imbalance theory^2,3 to a new one in which emotional suffering is tied to “disordered” circuits within the brain. Many complementary and alternative medical (CAM) clinicians have, unfortunately, endorsed similar notions that mental or emotional suffering is largely due to faulty biochemistry (including brain chemistry). In doing so, CAM clinicians share culpability for promoting unsubstantiated ideas to unsuspecting members of the public and vulnerable patients.