Stephen Diamond closes his post today, which is the second of two posts on depression as a disease, with this paragraph:
Today we are engaged in a pitched battle for the hearts and minds of the public as regards the relative roles of biology and psychology, nature and nurture, genes and traumatic stressors, in the development and treatment of mental disorders. Here, I am fighting for the depressed patient's need for more, not less, psychology. But if, for example, the general public and mental health professionals accept, as many already have, the literal materialist notion of depression as disease, or the self-proclaimed "scientific fundamentalism" of evolutionary psychologists like fellow blogger Satoshi Kanazawa--who shockingly claims that parenting (or lack thereof) exerts zero, nada, zip, no influence whatever on personality development and psychopathology--this fight will be lost.
And I quite agree. BUT the very fact that there is a pitched battle is pretty much unknown to those over whom the battle is being fought -- those who struggle with various and sundry mental disorders and problems in living. As I wrote earlier today, the dominant paradigm is the neurobiological one. That is the one major news outlets publish about, that magazines do cover stories on, that patients and would-be patients receive as they are targeted for advertising for psychopharmacological drugs.
The voice of those of us who see the scene through a different lens is not coming through when the NY Times runs a long story in its magazine on pediatric bipolar disorder without giving more than the slightest nod to the reality that this is a highly controversial subject and one that many have not signed on with.
It certainly feels like a pitched battle to me but most of the people I know outside of my field even know there is a battle at all. We can't hope to make a dent unless we can get our voices heard.