The reductionist methods of neuroscience have created psychiatric practices that treats mental disorders exclusively using chemical solutions.
There is of course no doubt that a person cannot think his way out of chemical imbalances. However, the brain's function is also to develop for itself the methods to find equilibrium.
Therefore, if we never give the opportunity for brains to learn how to do this, then we will always have people dependent of artificial crutches.
Imagine a world where physical therapy is completely absent. That's the kind of world we have today for psychology. We construct the crutches but we don't provide the methods to ween oneself away from those crutches.
Yes, the brain is extremely complex and we simply do not know how to do physical therapy for the brain. But surely we must know to perform exercises for the healthy brain?
Which highlights another problem of society. We don't know how to educate our youth and our selves! We have developed mechanistic ways of education based on reductionist ideas of the nature of the brain.
It is so bad that many people's understand education as just the distillation of information. Education for many isn't how to think but rather just the absorption of information. It is as if brains were like computers.
What really sucks is that I am neither a psychiatrist or an educator, yet I see the obvious flaws in both professions. But why can I see it? Because I've realized that the metaphors that we use to describe the living and the brain are entirely wrong.
Unfortunately, how we reason about solutions is dependent on the metaphors we use. If we have the wrong metaphors, we create not very useful solutions.
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