I think I'm hearing a fear that, if a disorder is not a result of some organic impairment in the structure or chemistry of the brain, then it's a chosen behavior, reflecting a character flaw in the person. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that an impairment of the mind does not necessarily imply an impairment of the brain. That doesn't mean that an impairment of the mind is less real than an organic brain disease. I happen to believe that the mind is real. It can become afflicted with a disorder. Disorders of the mind are as real as real gets. No one chooses to have a mental disorder. Too much damaging experience, and/or too little appropriate experience can lead to mental malfunction, even in a person born with a completely normal brain. What happens to us matters. It matters in the extreme. What doesn't happen to us also matters. Equipping a person to function successfully in this complicated world requires an awful lot of the right training. Lots of people are poorly-trained. That doesn't mean their parents were necessarily evil or negligent. Nor does it mean that these persons were uninterested in learning what they needed to know. For a multitude of other reasons, a person can emerge from childhood with an approach to life that is simply inadequate. I don't mean only skills, like how to read a newspaper and how to balance a checkbook. There are more complex challenges like how to deal with being hazed on a new job by coworkers who are mean to newcomers. I've known some individuals who were unemployable because they could not cope with that. Under the stress of being ill-treated, they fell apart. Faced with being unfairly antagonized, they either became so passive that they were bullied mercilessly, or they became so hostile that they were let go for out-of-bounds anger displays. Being able to deflect those who would undermine you for no good reason can be very difficult to learn. It doesn't surprise me at all that some individuals respond like a deer caught in the headlights. They can experience severe emotional distress in these situations. It doesn't imply that they inherited a bad chromosome or have a neurotransmitter deficit in their brain. Most likely they just never learned how to cope with this type of adversity. Maybe they grew up in a peaceful home, exposed to little conflict.

A child who's never exposed to germs will have an underfunctioning immune system. Growing up, we actually need to have some unhappy things happen to us to get us ready for that cold, cruel world we'll be competing in. We each have what I'll call a "mental immune system." It has to be stimulated by a good bit of unhappy experience. At the same time, it must not be excessively challenged by overwhelmingly bad experiences that destroy confidence. Racking up sufficient experience that falls in the sweet zone of enough, but not too much, requires a lot of luck. None of us gets the ideal amount. I think that's the main reason why we each have our vulnerabilities. Some of us are so vulnerable that we can't cope. I don't think that's the fault of the vulnerable person. More likely, it's a mismatch between what their experience equipped them for and what life can demand in this tough world that we live in. That mismatch, IMHO, may be fundamental to what some call the "tragedy of the human condition." It is every bit as worthy of compassion as having a brain tumor.

I understand that my perspective is distrusted as sounding like a way to invalidate the struggles of persons with psychological disorders. It really isn't. I'm trying to dispute the notion that the cause of mental disorder always originates in the biology of the brain. Good genes and healthy neurons don't guarantee a high degree of mental fitness. One can have a healthy brain and a mental disorder at the same time. At one time, this was generally accepted. I'm suspicious of how it has come to be seen as heresy.

The main point, on which I think we all agree, is that mental disorders cause people to need support in a variety of forms. Some of that may be medical support. I would never wish to discourage anyone from accessing whatever they find helpful.