The Takeaway

Abstract

The current science around mental disorders has developed in response to our past inability to understand the etiology of the issues we were facing. We have developed phenotypical clusters and attempted to understand each of these clusters as if they are a specific form of medical disease.

The imposition of a disease model, over what is in many cases merely maladaptive behavior, has necessitated the creation of a diagnostic system and treatment methodologies that demand a disease interpretation. Ignoring our knowledge of how these phenotypical clusters were derived, we then go on to take what are no more than behavioral constructs and clinically treat them as diseases. We have researched them as single entity diseases and we speak about them in the same manner. We talk about disease types and treatment for these types of disease as if there isn’t significant confabulation in the description. All of this has led to disastrous consequences for ongoing research and treatment.

The brain of an individual with a maladaptive learned response is not permanently dysfunctional or broken. The connectome on which the learned behavior is based can be modified through further learning to produce more adaptive responses. No conception of illness is required to accomplish this modification but a firm scientifically based knowledge of how the brain learns and relearns is. Put simply, you don’t have to be ill to behave maladaptively, and you don’t have to be cured in order to behave better.