This is true. Leaving aside the spiritual aspects of our nature which I believe we have, everything that happens in the body and brain is bio electro chemical. The laws of chemistry and physics prevail.

I am not really arguing for how great psyche meds are because they aren't. I would very much like to know why Fetzima is working and then doesn't and when I increase the dose it works. I have experience with all sorts of illegal drugs and this is totally different than those. I would not call it mood altering in the same sense. If someone has a headache and takes aspirin and it works obviously it changed something bio chemically. It doesn't mean you are aspirin deficient.

I am arguing that it is certainly possible, and there is a large body of scientific evidence to back this up, that some psychiatric disorders for some people have a genetic and biological basis even from birth. I can post all kinds of links to real science but if you think it is no better than phrenology what is the point. Your mind is closed to it. Is someone on the severe end of the autism spectrum who has had symptoms since birth a matter of life circumstances.

It is pretty well established that the brain continues to develop and wire itself up through the teens. The situations you encounter at a young age can have an enormous impact on how your brain wires and organizes itself. The older you get the more hard wired it becomes and the harder to change. That does not mean it is impossible to change. Environmental things can change it but it can be difficult. Work with stroke victims who actually have dead parts of their brain and have lost function and then through therapy an adjacent part of the brain gets remapped and takes over those lost functions. This was very well established in a famous experiment with primates. Neuroplasticity. This has led to huge advances in the treatment of stroke victims. It is not because they ignored biology but because they better understood it and developed therapies in accordance that this was possible. I witnessed it in my mother.

So I would say that to ignore biology, brain chemistry, brain development, genetics and so on, when it comes to mental illness is not a prudent course. That doesn't mean all manner of treatment has to be meds. They may discover many different ways to better treat it. CBT and meditation are two examples.

So to the OP's question. If you were born with a predisposition to it or it was a result of circumstances in life that affected development and affect how you function today, than NO it doesn't make you a bad person.