Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

A Manifesto for Mental HealthWe are not the Slaves of our Brains

A Manifesto for Mental Health: We are not the Slaves of our Brains [It is a simple fact of life that all of our thoughts, behaviours and emotions emanate from the biological activity of our brains. But this does not imply that mental health problems therefore need to be regarded as brain diseases. Our brains have evolved to allow us to process information about the world and make sense of our environment. These neurological mechanisms underpin all psychological processes, whether that involves depression, anxiety, falling in love, writing poetry or going to war. It is vital to understand the involvement of neurotransmitters, of synapses and neurones in human behaviour, but it is misleading to suggest that only mental health problems have biological elements. The biology of human thought and human emotion is universal. When things happen to us, there are biological consequences (our brains change, physically, for example, when we’re lonely), but those consequences are true for all of us, not just those of us labelled as ‘ill’. We all differ in our basic biological makeup, but the science is clear: biological differences between people seem to explain very little of the differences between us in terms of our mental health.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Manifesto for Mental HealthWe are not the Slaves of our Brains

Kinderman, Peter
Springer Journals — Sep 23, 2019
Download PDF
30 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/a-manifesto-for-mental-health-we-are-not-the-slaves-of-our-brains-UhO14Iknsv
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
ISBN
978-3-030-24385-2
Pages
49 –79
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-24386-9_3
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[It is a simple fact of life that all of our thoughts, behaviours and emotions emanate from the biological activity of our brains. But this does not imply that mental health problems therefore need to be regarded as brain diseases. Our brains have evolved to allow us to process information about the world and make sense of our environment. These neurological mechanisms underpin all psychological processes, whether that involves depression, anxiety, falling in love, writing poetry or going to war. It is vital to understand the involvement of neurotransmitters, of synapses and neurones in human behaviour, but it is misleading to suggest that only mental health problems have biological elements. The biology of human thought and human emotion is universal. When things happen to us, there are biological consequences (our brains change, physically, for example, when we’re lonely), but those consequences are true for all of us, not just those of us labelled as ‘ill’. We all differ in our basic biological makeup, but the science is clear: biological differences between people seem to explain very little of the differences between us in terms of our mental health.]

Published: Sep 23, 2019

There are no references for this article.