A critical article about psychiatry has been doing the rounds. Regular Neuroskeptic readers will be all too familiar with the issues here, but to many people they're news.
Here's an article summarizing the original piece. The author's the head of a British think tank, but not a specialist in mental health, so he's probably a good example of the ''intelligent layman":
Neither – in relation to the fastest rising [mental health] diagnoses – is there any evidence of chemical imbalances in the brains of patients. In other words, the problem the [psychiatric] drugs are supposed to solve is an illusion.
There's no evidence of fairies in my garden, either. The concept of a 'chemical imbalance' in the human brain is one of the most fantastic oversimplifications in science, and one of the worst legacies of the modern pharmaceutical industry.
A bowl of soup could have a chemical imbalance. If you're ...
