Psychology, big business and theology

I’ve had a long and deeply personal interest in sources behind human behavior. It’s an area of research that has occupied consistent space in my studies for many years.

Over the past decade or so, I’ve had a growing uneasiness about the relationship between psychology and big business. There seems to be an urgent need for a deeper conversation about this alliance. The fields of counseling, psychotherapy and biopsychiatry have become big business.

I find myself asking if we should be nervous about the profit-driven concerns of these disciplines? Are the narratives they use for behavior assessment self-serving to their business interests in ways that could hurt the patient? 

Over the last several decades, the question of why we do the things we do has experienced a kind of social revolution. The two most prominent waves of thought trace human behavior to nurture (social context) and nature (genes and brain chemistry).

Until recently, the dominant narrative has been nurture and therapeutic psychiatry has been the authoritative discipline for understanding behavior. But breakthroughs in science and medicine shifted mainstream opinion toward nature as the best narrative for explaining behavior. The new authority is now a big business combination of biopsychology, pharmacology, medicine and the insurance industry.

Consider a simple overview of these two sources.

Nurture:

For many years, social context has supplied the main narrative for understanding personal behavior. The roles of parents and other significant adults or life-altering circumstances explain most of your current thoughts, attitudes, emotions and behaviors. You are the product of social context. Focus in this narrative looks at how you were hurt or helped by others. Were you deprived of nurture as a child? The things done to you or withheld from you, explain you. For many years, this has been the dominant assumption behind most psychotherapy. Words like “wounded,” ”dysfunctional” and “co-dependent” became stock vocabulary for psychiatrist.

The nurture assumption also defined the primary objectives for helping wounded people heal. The path to healing focused on rebuilding self-esteem through therapy. Over time therapeutic psychology highly influenced public education so that teachers had to add building self-esteem to their educational agenda. Early on in this narrative, the person who saw a psychiatrist bore a social stigma for needing a “shrink.” But it soon became fashionable to go to therapy to see your personal therapist/psychiatrist. In social and behavioral sciences, therapeutic psychology occupied the authoritative seat in helping people with life issues. But the recent emergence of bio-psycholgy and pharmacotherapy dethroned therapeutic psychology.                                                                    

Nature:

Advancements in science (particularly in genetics and neuroscience) gave way to new conclusions about human behavior. Scientific discoveries led researchers to conclude that our lives are largely shaped by genetic physical conditions and brain chemistry. This narrative is offered as the most objective explanation for emotions and behaviors and gave rise to the discipline of biopsychiatry. It also shifted the source for diagnosis and cure toward medical professionals. As progress was made in these fields a new leader took a seat at the table: pharmacotherapy. This led to a kind of wedding between big business pharmacology, the insurance industry and biopsychology.

Without denying the effects of social context, biopsychiatry appears to offer hard scientific conclusions as a reigning narrative for the sources and cures to human behavior. And, since sources to behavior trace to your body and brain, medical prescriptions (it’s postulated) offer the most objective solutions. It’s now accepted dogma that neuro-chemical deficiencies explain a host of personal problems ranging from depression and anxiety to learning deficiencies.

The primary example of the influence of biopsychiatry is the exponential increase in depression and anxiety diagnoses and the prescription of medications for alleviating them. Treatment of depression in outpatient services increased by 300% toward the end of the 20th century. Antidepressant medications have become the largest selling prescription drugs in America. During the 1990s, spending increased by 600% exceeding 7 billion dollars annually by the year 2000. Estimates now indicate that major depression afflicts 10-12% of Americans. A disconcerting by-product has been an inability to distinguish biologically based depression from normal sadness.

More objective efforts are needed in working toward a holistic narrative for helping people to understand themselves and their problems. The merging of big business and behavioral research is a slippery and potentially harmful arrangement. Human beings are more complicated than narratives of nurture and nature. Each aspect offers important considerations but neither should be permitted to exclude the other. More importantly, an additional discipline must be invited to the table.

It might surprise some to know that the discipline of theology offers a wider perspective because it reinforces the fact that God created humans as physical, psychological, social and spiritual beings. Each of these dimensions should be considered in understanding why we do the things we do.  

Steve Cornell