that 'chemical imbalance' myth

Oh god, that reminds me of the funeral of a young woman last year, she had been an inpatient in a unit for girls/young women with eating disorders and borderline personality disorder (the whole borderline thing is awful isn't it, what happened to the idea of reclassifying it as a sort of complex PTSD type thing? Was that a non starter?) and had a horrible horrible horrible life. None of which was even obliquely alluded to, it was as if this bright and happy child just quite inexplicably died tragically young instead of being abused, betrayed by the agencies who first failed to protect her then failed to respond to the disclosure and finally the mental health industry that labelled her as inherently wrong because she couldn't articulate her distress in any way other than the sort of self injurious

it's so awful, such a fucking preventable waste

and anyway, if we MUST be so regressive then please can we get back to the days of hysteria and the prescriptions for masturbation? Treatment to which I could definitely commit.

I have been told (by cpns not psychiatrists) to think of my bipolar/manic depression as a 'chemical imbalance' and countless people I have met through self help networks were similarly encouraged - yet despite all this emphasis on research into biological determinants (like it says in the blog) not one single treatment has been developed for bipolar! Not even one drug. If you put lithium to one side (as a naturally occurring element) everything else used to treat bipolar was developed for schizophrenia, epilepsy or depression - and the NICE guidelines discourage the use of antidepressants for obvious reasons (the manic switch)

but I'm straying from my original intent which was to see whether the chemical imbalance myth is particularly oppressive for women given the innately sexist history of psychiatry. It is worrying that people submit funding applications for research into the role of social support in, say, first episode psychosis and are declined while there genuinely has been research into gathering images of hedgehog brains. I think we need both but for women particularly, is it not profoundly depressing that we are still being told the problem is us and not the structural unfairness of society?

I thought it was extremely rare for an actual 'shortage of serotonin' to be implicated in manic depression (which I am supposed to have but can't take anything like an SSRI without becoming seriously unwell). obviously there are certain medications (for high blood pressure) which lower serotonin and make people depressed but that's slightly different

I was thinking more along the lines of the ways in which women were encouraged to develop dependence on benzos etc in the fifties, as a way of distracting them from the glaring inequalities that were making them unwell and of depression particularly which unsurprisingly women are encouraged to seek treatment for far more often than men