Blue States - Another Angle

One of the Left's most irritating habits is to stumble upon a sliver of some truth that we've been trying to get them to see for decades, and then put it on proud display like some glittering gem of wisdom they've unearthed all on their own.

Of course they never acknowledge that the Right was there first, and certainly never admit that they once held an opposing viewpoint.

It's happened again, this time on the subject of mood disorders, and it's really depressing.

For years it has been impossible to watch or listen to any news program for long without encountering a profile of someone suffering from Depression (capital D) who, we were told, was helplessly in the grip of a brain-chemical imbalance, specifically, a lack of serotonin.

"It's not just a state of mind," we were told. "It really, physically hurts."

There's no doubt these disorders can be very real, though many may have wondered quietly if there wasn't also a certain element of personal choice involved.

But you needed to do such wondering pretty quietly indeed, because the sufferers and their defenders would go at you elbows and incisors if you challenged their prevailing disease model: that Depression wasn't a flawed pattern of thinking, but a disease. Like the mumps, but you could still go to wine and cheese parties.

No more, at least not according to a news item by Alix Spiegel that ran on NPR this week.

"Chemical imbalance is sort of last-century thinking. It's much more complicated than that," Spiegel quotes Dr. Joseph Coyle, neuroscience professor at Harvard Medical School, as saying. "It's really an outmoded way of thinking."

In the piece, Alix disingenuously wonders why, if the science is leading us in the other direction, everybody still thinks brain chemistry -- specifically serotonin -- is at fault.

Well, that could be because we've heard nothing else for a couple of decades now, as big media relentlessly pounded serotonin into our ears because the chemical imbalance theory fits so well within the Left's longstanding behavior paradigm: No one is responsible for their own state of mind or their own life choices.

It's been enough to give one a headache. Especially now that quotes like this one are emerging from the NPR piece: "I don't think there's any convincing body of data that anybody has ever found that Depression is associated to a significant extent with a loss of serotonin," according to Pedro Delgado, chair of the University of Texas Dept. of Psychiatry.

In fact, even NPR mentions -- in passing -- that things like talk therapy are showing good success now, though the thought quickly disappears into the underbrush of continued searching for an overarching "cause" of Depression, this time in the sufferer's genes.

What is "talk therapy"? In short, it's a treatment plan that is showing good success with a range of mood disorders, including anxiety and obsessive states. It is based essentially on the patient working to choose different, more positive patterns of thought and then buttressing them with repetition and positive reinforcement.

And it works, partly because it helps alter... wait for it... brain chemistry.

It's enough to put one in a good mood.