"Internalizing my diagnoses as inscriptions of emotional destiny also alleviated my sense of personal blame for the inability to will away my black dogs."

"When the drugs failed to deliver the cure I’d been promised, I didn’t dare reveal my shameful secret: that maybe the issue wasn’t just with chemicals in my brain, but a bad and broken me. Nearly two decades later, I quake with anger at the wholesale failure of mental health care in America — a rigid and restrictive system that leaves even the reasonably privileged, like me, with little to work with, and so many others with nothing. The primacy of the chemical imbalance theory of mental and neurological disorders may be at the root of the problem. It is an oversimplification at best. A new book by the Harvard Medical historian Anne Harrington, 'Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness,' argues that the 'tunnel vision' of modern psychiatry, with its fixation on wiring and fixed diagnoses, cannot adequately address what has yet to be understood about the human psyche."

From "It’s Not Just a Chemical Imbalance/Thinking of my mental illness as preordained missed many of the causes of — and solutions to — my emotional suffering," by Kelli María Korducki (NYT).