This is not an attack on neuroscience, pharmacology, or the study of the brain. Those are instruments, and an instrument is neither noble nor vile; it is only sharp, useful, and obedient in the hand that wields it. This attack is on something that has dressed itself in the authority of instruments while remaining, at its core, a moral doctrine of innocence masquerading as causal explanation. Our neurochemical imbalance myth is not primarily a claim about molecules; it is a claim about responsibility. It is an arrangement of blame. It is a technique for locating suffering where it can be managed without accusation. I will address it in its most respectable form, not in the nursery slogans that flatter the public with simplicity, because only strong doctrines deserve execution. I will not ask the puerile question, “is it true?” as though truth were a matter of polite verification balanced by citation. I will ask a deeper question; what kind of life needs this to be true, what kind of society rewards it, what kind of institutional order depends upon it, and what kind of weakness must continually reassert itself through explanations that turn the world into scenery and the person into fault?
Benjamin James (Thu,) studied this question.