The Root Cause of Mental Illness

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Palliative care is better than no care at all, but it's not the effective or holistic way of getting at the problem. Part of my research and the book that I'm writing is sort of looking at what was called liberation psychiatry in Latin America in the 1970s. It starts with a very simple idea which is that you cannot be mentally, you can't have mental health unless you're liberated from the social structures that are making you sick. And so there needs to be this palliative work where you sort of support the person who's being made ill by these larger social structures.

When psychiatrist Marco Ramos of Yale University prescribes antidepressants to patients in distress and they ask him how they work, Ramos admits: We don't really know. And too often, they don't work at all. Despite decades of brain research and billions of dollars spent, psychiatry has made little progress in understanding mental illness. Listen as Ramos explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts how the myth of the biological basis for mental illness began, why it stubbornly persists, and why honesty about what we know and don't know is the best policy.