We are not the Slaves of our Brains

Abstract

It is a simple fact of life that all of our thoughts, behaviours and emotions emanate from the biological activity of our brains. But this does not imply that mental health problems therefore need to be regarded as brain diseases. Our brains have evolved to allow us to process information about the world and make sense of our environment. These neurological mechanisms underpin all psychological processes, whether that involves depression, anxiety, falling in love, writing poetry or going to war. It is vital to understand the involvement of neurotransmitters, of synapses and neurones in human behaviour, but it is misleading to suggest that only mental health problems have biological elements. The biology of human thought and human emotion is universal. When things happen to us, there are biological consequences (our brains change, physically, for example, when we’re lonely), but those consequences are true for all of us, not just those of us labelled as ‘ill’. We all differ in our basic biological makeup, but the science is clear: biological differences between people seem to explain very little of the differences between us in terms of our mental health.