Health Self Defense ❤️🔥😷Why your dopamine, cortisol, or brain isn't causing your suffering or what you do in your daily life.
https://healthselfdefense.substack.com/p/why-your-dopamine-cortisol-or-brain
To claim that all our behavior depends on our brain, neurotransmitters, or any other brain variable is an error known in psychology as “biological reductionism” or “brain-centrism.”
When we say that the brain is the cause of everything we do, we commit a conceptual error that undermines a century of scientific research in psychology, given the limited importance and rigor our science holds in today’s society.
Eliminating the brain as a direct cause of our suffering does not diminish the importance of neuropsychology as a well-established science. Most serious neuroscientists do not reduce the causes of behavior to physicochemical brain processes.
Even though the brain does not directly cause behavior, it is a mistake to deny the influence it does, in fact, exert on behavior.
The problem lies in generating simplistic brain-based explanations for complex problems, exceeding the limits of neuroscience, and underestimating its explanatory power. The argument that dopamine is the cause of our happiness is supported by the social benefits of associating your opinions with medicine, evading responsibility, justifying the “chronicity of mental disorders,” and taking advantage of a system that makes the individual responsible for their own suffering.
What happens in the brain is not the direct cause, but rather the “effect” of both our behavior and the current political, economic, cultural, and social system that governs the world we live in.
Human activities are no more dependent on the brain than the brain itself is on the contexts with which people interact. The brain is more a consequence of our evolution as a species than the cause of that evolution.
Eliminating brain-centric reductionism restores the individual to their rightful central role. The functions assigned to the brain are, in reality, activities inherent to the individual, occurring within a specific society and culture.
We do not behave as independent parts of our organism, such as the brain or the nervous system. Behavior can only be understood as that of the entire organism. The organism behaves as a whole, not as isolated parts.
If the brain is damaged, a person’s activity may be interrupted or limited.
However, this doesn’t mean that the activity was generated, caused, or produced by the brain, and is therefore limited to its cells and neural circuits. Things are always happening in the brain, no matter what we do. It’s a mistake to diagnose biological problems, such as “depression,” by asking questions about our behavior.
The accumulation of studies on the brain-related causes of our behavior is not evidence of sound research or progress, but rather that there is still no definitive study to justify such investigation. Neuroscience is not ready for “grand unitary theories” that allow us to reduce the cause of everything we do to a single part of our brain. People’s suffering cannot be reduced to neurochemical imbalances and faulty circuits. The origin of any behavioral problem does not lie in a medical condition.
The greatest condemnation in the history of mental health will always be the medicalization of behavior. Everything we do has consequences in the brain, since the fact that differences exist between human brains does not mean that we have found a definitive and scientific explanation for behavioral differences between people. All efforts dedicated to validating the “serotonin, dopamine, or norepinephrine hypothesis” as the cause of our problems have failed. The “one psychotropic drug for one disease” hypothesis is a perfect marketing concept for pharmaceutical companies. Psychotropic drugs are an alternative and additional treatment used in very specific circumstances, not a complete and definitive treatment. It should be used in every case, massively and irresponsibly.
When we ingest a psychotropic drug, the “improvement” we observe is merely the temporary effect of the drug, not a change in the real psychological root of the problem.
Psychotropic drugs don’t solve your problems; they only put them on pause.
The politicization of distress is necessary not only to reject the individualistic approach but also to provide an example of how emotions are collectivized. Ayesha Khan does tremendous work and serves as an example; here she analyzes suicide from a political and harm reduction perspective:
“Suicide rates have been increasing under late-stage capitalism as ecological destruction escalates & working class people have fewer guarantees of any stability or security. Marginalized communities have the worst health outcomes & lower life expectancies independent of cause. Oppressive systems are the most dominant form of systemic trauma that impacts people’s overall health causing mental distress and physical illnesses. Black folks in the U.S. for example have higher rates of chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes due to intergenerational oppression. Similarly, oppressive systems facilitate & cause suicide. Oppressive systems are literally designed to abuse, exploit and brutalize people so this is right up in their alley.
There is no single, homogenous, “sociopolitical model” but what they get right is focus on the systemic roots of suicide & take a collectivist approach by wanting to prevent deaths by building life-affirming community-based systems of care. I believe we have to fight to abolish capitalism by any means necessary, be unified in our political struggle to build a world where life is truly valued, preserved & sustained and apply those values in our daily life to show up in our communities today as best we can. However, these approaches still never question the base assumption shaped by social norms- that someone’s decision to die is unequivocally “bad” in all scenarios.
Leftist harm reduction approaches to drug use, for example, aim to provide people with safer access to drugs without labeling people’s choice to use them as innately “wrong”. They also simultaneously work to meet people’s basic survival needs in order to improve our quality of life in the short-term (mutual aid) & long-term (abolition of capitalism & all oppressive hierarchical systems). This revolutionary, non-judgmental, compassionate approach see’s drug use as an inevitable coping mechanism for many in an oppressive society without judgment & acknowledges its complexities. The same framework is not applied to suicide, however, where regardless of the context, choosing to die a dignified death is never an acceptable option.
Abolition as a political strategy is not about ending oppression thinking there will be no harm or conflict that can occur in some future utopia. Abolition involves us acknowledging the complexities of communal dynamics itself including addressing the social conditions that lead to interpersonal violence (poverty/ inequity/ intergenerational trauma) & creating transformative systems that can address harm without punishment or exile. I believe that the same framework can be applied to us building systems that affirm life in the fullest, most complex sense which includes fighting like hell for people to have guaranteed access to survival resources & community care which we need to stay alive while also honoring the agency & autonomy in select situations when one might choose to die without forcing them to live against their will. (…)
Despite decades of billions spent on “suicide prevention” campaigns with slogans about “breaking the silence”, suicide rates continue to increase as suicidal people continue to be silenced. Majority of testimonial perspectives on suicide come from “experts” working on it through a colonial, capitalist lens, the loved ones, or ex-suicidal people who can be portrayed as a “good story” of “overcoming” adversity that validates the mainstream narrative. There is no complexity. This is also a byproduct of a neoliberal society defined by toxic positivity & respectability politics where anything arbitrary designated “negative” is dismissed with more attention paid to superficial optics rather than substance. People who have died by ending their own life are mostly scapegoated as pitiful, inferior tragedies and used as “cautionary tales” which always demonizes their choice as irrational, incomprehensible, illogical, weak, and just plain “wrong” reducing the problem of suicide to “bad individuals”. It also reinforces the fact that living is always the “right” choice (without making anyone too uncomfortable about your reality)- even with crushing pain & suffering that is not alleviated despite you & your community’s best efforts. Suicide is ultimately framed in dominant culture as a sign of someone too weak to “fight their battles” & never a legitimate choice one should consider in response to their suffering. (…)
Survival is a collective responsibility. Sustaining life requires us to address the oppressive systems that are killing us. It’s on us all to build communities that value & truly support life. To that end, “suicide prevention” isn’t helplines, cops & prisons- its systems that guarantee food, water, shelter, healthcare, community support for everyone when they enter this world. In the short-term, this looks like mutual aid efforts & solidarity building. “Suicide prevention” is an end to capitalism, the state, all oppressive systems & hierarchies. Preventing suicide requires at baseline there to be systems that honor, value & sustain ecological diversity as we facilitate people’s reconnection to their ecosystems.” Destigmatize Suicide: An abolitionist, harm reduction approach to the right to live & die
https://wokescientist.substack.com/p/destigmatize-suicide-an-abolitionist
