Psychiatric insanity

I heard a story about a family member that is well worth repeating as it demonstrates a hole in psych thinking that one could drive a cruise ship through.

A young boy was molested by the father of one of his friends. The victim became very skittish, unable to deal with life, constantly on edge, withdrawn, etc.

He was about to be put on pills prescribed by a psych when a family member managed to intervene and direct the kid's mother down a safer path.

Let's think this through a bit. According to shrinks, mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance that is remedied by giving their victims powerful mind-alterning, brain chemistry impacting drugs. At least that is the justification for paying them billions of dollars to drug 8 million US kids and countless millions of other people around the world.

So, if the kid needed drugs to handle the condition, the shrink was obviously saying that a chemical imbalance was present. If not, there would be no justification for attacking the kids brain.

But, doesn't that mean that the emotional experience of being molested caused the chemical imbalance?

The kid was fine before being molested. He was not fine afterwards -- the molestation is the obvious point that lead to the change.

So, how do they reconcile giving a kid drugs that don't help deal with the experience but only adjust a supposed chemical imbalance? The molestation is the obvious starting point for the problems.

I guess we can only conclude that experience causes chemical imbalances.

But, if experience causes chemical imbalance, then the chemical imbalance is obviously NOT the cause of the mental problems, the experience is.

In that case, where do they get off saying that chemical imbalances are the cause of mental illness and why don't they pay more attention to the experiences that might underlie problems?

Perhaps they might say that the chemical imbalance was latent, just waiting for something to mysteriously cause it to kick in. Even then, wouldn't the logical point of address still be the experience?

I mean if experience can cause a chemical imbalance to kick in, why couldn't a different kind of experience cause the chemical imbalance to "kick out"?

In either case, the real point of attack, the real point of interest is the experience, not the chemistry.

Unless of course, the chemical imbalance has nothing to do with it and the only real intent is to just drug the kid into a stupor that denies the whole experience. In that case, why not give him a daily healthy dose of bourbon? It's cheaper and less immediately brain-damaging.

Even with that suggestion I'm probably being generous and assuming that care for the kid enters into it at all.

Perhaps the intent is closer to: "let's put the kid on a drug that will make him a patient and cash cow for life. The drug has to stifle him enough or deaden his feelings enough so he's less trouble because then no one will notice there's a problem and they'll keep paying for the drugs and for my high boat payments."