There is no scientific proof of any kind that mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances

“The serotonin theory is as close as any theory in the history of science to having been proved wrong. Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future.”

Zeitschrift für Psychologie 2014; 222(3): 128–134.
doi: 10.1027/2151-2604/a000176
PMID: 25279271
Irving Kirsch”

“Doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions. But instead, companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the benefits by design. When these trials produce unflattering results, the data is simply buried. All of this is perfectly legal. In fact, even government regulators withhold vitally important data from the people who need it most. Doctors and patient groups have stood by too, and failed to protect us. Instead, they take money and favours, in a world so fractured that medics and nurses are now educated by the drugs industry. The result: patients are harmed in huge numbers.”
- Anatomy of an epidemic

“There are indications that it is ineffective in the long-term outlook of bipolar disorders, and it’s known to be associated with various forms of harm.”
- J. Moncrieff, “Lithium: evidence reconsidered,” British journal of psychiatry 171 (1997):113-19.

“There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that clinical depression is due to any kind of biological deficit state,” wrote Colin Ross, an associate professor of psychiatry at Southwest Medical Center in Dallas, in his 1995 book, Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry.
- C. Ross, Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 111., p 74

“Contemporary neuroscience research has failed to confirm any serotonergic lesion in any mental disorder, and has in fact provided significant counterevidence to the explanation of a simple neurotransmitter deficiency.
Modern neuroscience has instead shown that the brain is vastly complex and poorly understood. While neuroscience is a rapidly advancing field, to propose that researchers can objectively identify a “chemical imbalance” at the molecular level is not compatible with the extant science. In fact, there is no scientifically established ideal “chemical balance” of serotonin, let alone an identifiable pathological imbalance.
To equate the impressive recent achievements of neuroscience with support for the serotonin hypothesis is a mistake. … Yet, as previously mentioned, there is no such thing as a scientifically established correct “balance” of serotonin.
The take-home message for consumers viewing SSRI advertisements is probably that SSRIs work by normalizing neurotransmitters that have gone awry. This was a hopeful notion 30 years ago, but is not an accurate reflection of present-day scientific evidence.
Consider the medical textbook, Essential Psychopharmacology, which states, “So far, there is no clear and convincing evidence that monoamine deficiency accounts for depression; that is, there is no ‘real’ monoamine deficit”.
- Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature, Jeffrey R. Lacasse, Jonathan Leo, PloS Medicine 2, 2005

“The dopaminergic theory of schizophrenia retains little credibility for psychiatrists,” observed Pierre Deniker in 1990.
Four years later, John Kane, a well-known psychiatrist at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, echoed the sentiment, noting that there was “no good evidence for any perturbation of the dopamine function in schizophrenia.”
- J. Kane, “Towards more effective antipsychotic treatment,” British Journal of Psychiatry 165, suppl. 25 (1994): 22-31. Fn 27

Psychiatric drugs cause biological changes in the brain that sensitize persons to mental illnesses, therefore increasing chances of relapse when drug administration is discontinued and as a result keeping patients trapped in the false care of psychiatric service.
The devastating consequences are seen in our society: since the introduction of “modern” psychopharmaceuticals, about 30 years ago, there has been a dramatic rise in psychiatric patients of all DSM categories.

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