E. Fuller Torrey on the New Anti-biological Antipsychiatry

This post by E. Fuller Torrey was noted on another blog especially the phrase "the new anti-biological antipsychiatry".  Torrey explains anosognosia both as a biological phenomenon and why it may be "deeply disturbing" to the new antipsychiatrists.  Basically it represents the difference between social behavior based on choice versus social behavior based on brain damage.  The former  might be a civil rights issue but the latter is a medical problem that benefits from identification, study, and treatment.  Torrey is also clear about the consequences of no treatment, facts that the antipsychiatrists conveniently often leave out of their arguments or more conveniently blame on treatment.

There is a lot of technical information apart from the data on anosognosia that is ignored by the new anti-biological antipsychiatry.  There are studies on the prefrontal cortex that go back for decades and the implications for social behavior and the neurobiology of everything from addiction to dementia.

Here is a link to the original blog post by Duncan Double entitled: "E. Fuller Torrey attacks 'The new antipsychiatry.'"  Defending against attacks by the new antipsychiatry is more like it.  Dr. Double laments the fact that at times he is seen as an antipsychiatrist, even though he essentially maintains many of the positions of mainstream antipsychiatry.   He includes a variation of the old antipsychiatry argument that if you don't have a specific test for a disease - the disease does not exist.  That opinion fails to take into account studies about what is or is not a disease as well as a massive literature of biological psychiatry.  It also fails to take into account the fact that these arguments are political in nature and have very little to do with science.

A good example is the chemical imbalance red herring.  Any psychiatrist trained since the 1970s is aware of the complex neurobiology of human behavior.  I can recall reading Axelrod's paper in Science over 30 years ago.  Since then there have been eight editions of The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology and five editions of the ACNP text Neuropsychopharmacology.  Since then a psychiatrist has won the Noble Prize for contributions in neuroplasticity and wrote a seminal article on neuroplasticity and learning in psychotherapy.  That is apparently ignored by the anti-biological antipsychiatry crowd and those who would characterize the field as prescribers versus therapists.  The Internet is currently full of diagrams of cell signalling pathways with the associated proteins and genetics.  The idea that chemical imbalance reflects some central central theory of biological psychiatry or represents anything beyond pharmaceutical company marketing hype reflects a gross misunderstanding of the field.

Any psychiatrist who tries to respond to these crude arguments is at a disadvantage for a couple of reasons.  It is certainly seems true that the antipsychiatrists political stance is really not conducive to scientific discourse.  Suggesting that the appearance of conflict of interest invalidates psychiatry is an obvious example.  Discounting the amassed research on the neurobiology of mental illness is another.  A political argument is well outside the scope of hypothesis generation and testing.  Dismissing the science by attributing it to the "worldview" of a single person is consistent with that political approach.