Darwin Drugs And The Divine By Jo Marchant

Cautious Mental Health Treatment Education Many people have different opinions on the best way to treat mental health issues. Some of these different opinions were covered in the class “Darwin, Drugs, and the Divine”. “Darwin” was one of the science-based ideas where we mainly talked about mental illness being caused by a chemical imbalance. “Drugs” was the treatment portion of this idea. The theory was that because you had a chemical imbalance in your brain, the only way to fix it was to take medication to “fix” that imbalance. “Divine” seemed to be the aspect where other forms of coping were integrated such as talk therapy and exercise. The title “Darwin, Drugs, and the Divine” captures three different versions of treatments used to help those struggling with mental health based on each belief of the best way to go about that process. The discussion on the “Darwin” part of this class focused heavily on the history of mental health and the drastic statistical increase of people who are struggling with mental health. In our discussions and lectures, we talked about the history of the “chemical imbalance theory”. It was a …show more content…

They are the medical explanation and solution to this new quickly rising mental health struggle. In “The Cure” by Jo Marchant she talks about the popularity of taking drugs for one’s mental health but also reflects that there isn’t a significant difference between taking an anti-depressant medication and a placebo medication. This shows that even though drugs are supposedly the “best” treatment as marketed by pharmaceutical companies, they aren’t all that effective. The pharmaceutical companies were so effective because their intentions were rooted in money. If they could get people to believe that their mental health struggles were due to a chemical imbalance, that it was a life-long struggle but it could all be fixed by a drug, then they had a life-long customer and were making a lot of