Chemical inbalances??? what cause them???

[Julie359]

Hi everyone.... was just reading through some posts and the question came up... what actually causes a chemical inbalance in the brain in the first place??????  

Also does suffering from a terrible event cause the brain to become chemically unbalanced or is it diet or a bit of both???

[Paxiled]

When you say chemical imbalance, the question is, what disorder are you talking about?  They're not all the same.  As for anxiety and depression, there is no evidence of a chemical imbalance in anyone.  This idea was started by the pharmaceutical industry to sell their antidepressants, but no study has ever found that somebody with depression or anxiety has any more or less serotonin or norepinephrine or glutamate than anyone else.  On the other hand, there is some evidence with true bipolar or what used to be called schizophrenia that there is a problem with dopamine and possibly glutamate.  But really, most of the data we have on these things is from pictures of neural activity, not chemical activity.  In other words, somebody with anxiety may show in a scan heightened activity in a certain part of the brain, but that isn't the same as a chemical imbalance.  There's also no proof of a genetic base for any of these diseases.  On the other hand, there is some statistical data, but not enough for scientists to have formed a conclusion at this point.  What drugs we take for these disorders are based on trials showing they have some beneficial effect, not trials showing they are treating the cause of the disease.  That's why drugs don't cure anxiety or depression, they just treat symptoms.  But this is very common in allopathic medicine; most of it doesn't cure, it just treats symptoms.  It's true for cancer -- cancer is a disease of the immune system no longer able to control the rate of growth of cells, but treatment is surgery, radiation, and chemo for tumors, but the tumors aren't the disease, just a symptom of it.  That's why they call it remission, not cure.  This also doesn't mean chemical imbalance is a myth, it's an unproven theory.  Someday, it may prove to be a proven theory.  

[Jasmine1006]

reading over my comment, i hope i didn't come across as rude or anything...if so i didn't mean to. i'm just really confused about how anxiety works and starts and blah.

[Jasmine1006]

good topic

...but then i read that the chemical imbalance thing is just a myth because there's no way to find out if there's an imbalance in the brain or not. so many people say so many things. maybe it's just different for every person. it's pretty tricky.

[ILADVOCATE]

Clinical research is showing most psychiatric disabilities are genetic and that the chemical imbalance is either inherited or develops through a mutation in genes like many other disabilities and illnesses.