Chemical imbalance is backwards reasoning and it is simply a way of giving people a false model why they should take meds.

Say one has high blood pressure and gets diuretics and the blood pressure normalizes. Then would you say See, the reason you had high blood pressure was you had too much water in your body? No, you wouldn't, but in psychiatry this backwards reasoning is allowed. Just because a chemical helps, the problem must be chemical. Must it? Actually no.

But if you tell it how it is, that your brain has so many things about it, you have different paths of neurons, and paths constantly forming and disconnecting, you have the neuron itself, the coating of it controlling impulses, gaps between cells where the chemicals we talk about when we mention chemical imbalance exist (only), parts of the brain well or less well developed... and every system affect the next system... if you say that and then say, lets forget this whole brain structure and only focus on some of the chemicals that jumps a nerve impulse to the next cell, people would probably wonder why this fixation. And they might not want to take something affecting this system when the brain is about so much more.

It is much easier to say there is a true imbalance in these gaps between neurons that only affects the substances here, it is a "guilt" free explanation.... until someone asks, but why does the imbalance occur?

When you add a med what happens is not just that a certain substance become less or more common, what happens is that a non-chemical reaction of the nerve cells themselves occur, they might grow more receptors for the chemicals, or wither them.

I don't think I have any chemical imbalance at all. Still my meds work. But IMO they compensate for "failure" in other systems, and I think this "failure" is on every level of the brain because everything is connected. The "one thing wrong" view simply can't be right the way I see it.