Psychiatry must stop misleading people about the nature of mental illness

As I've said many times (see eg. last post), psychiatry must stop misleading people about the nature of mental illness. It wants to hold on to the possibility that primary mental illness is caused by the brain but the reality is that the vast majority of presentations to mental health services are not caused by the brain. 

Psychiatry likes to make out that it takes psychosocial as well as biological factors in mental illness into account. It is true that the degree to which individual practitioners do varies. But too often, the message heard by patients is that there is something wrong with their brain. After all, why are psychiatrists so keen to prescribe medication if they don't think that mental health problems are caused by brain dysfunction which needs correcting by the medication?

Of course brain dysfunction can lead to organic mental illness, such as dementia and delirium. These conditions can generally be separated in clinical assessment from the bulk of functional psychiatric presentations because of symptoms of cognitive impairment, such as disorientation in time and place. But misleading people that their functional mental health problems are due to brain dysfunction can have consequences for people's understanding of themselves. Taking psychiatric medication can be identity altering, for example making people feel different or damaged and reliant on medical expertise. Psychiatry must be clear with people with primary mental health problems that they are not biologically flawed.