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Question:
Thinking ( good. bad, and neither; including the kind that makes you happy or sad, maybe even clinically depresed) consists of swarms off neurons shooting each other on and off in many complex ways. Essential to this process are neurotransmitters which carry mesages from neuron to neuron, telling them to fire or not. A 'chemical imbalance' occurs when there is too much or too little of some neurotransmitter here or there in the neuronal process which IS thinking. Variou combinations of efforts to think better and of medication may improve the thinking/firing. there i no conflict between meds and therapy; they both do roughly the same thing to same process. The only real issue in any individual case is to choose the most useful means to achieve the desired ends.
Answer:
I guess that since you can control your neuron ransmitters you can also make yourself feel like you just got shot up with heroin or morphine and can make any physical pain stop by manipulating them. Or feel like you just smoked pot or dropped acid or make yourself have a massive orgasm just by manipulating your neuron transmitters. It must be a very interesting way to live. I myself can't and have never met anyone that could. As a matter of fact, I find it EXTREMELY difficult that you can affect what pysically goes on in your brain or any other part of your body by thinking. Do you have any mantras for us to try??? I can 'control' the way various muscles contract, mucles of which I am not even aware, by raising my arm. Similarly, I can 'control" brain activity by thinking one thing rather another. This does not mean I can do anything at all with my brain or mucles. Of course, I cannot intentionally make any particular mucle fiber twitch at will, nor can I so make a particular neuron fire. But it appears that we can (say) raise the level of certain neurottransmitters in our brain by thinking in certain ways--you may att this moment increase norepinepherine levels in your brain and firing rates in your amygdala (?) by working yourself into a worried state about something; or you can have opposite effects witth some effective erotic fantasy. Or you could achieve similarf effects by taking some coffee or alcahol. My rather mundane point is merely that talk therapy and medication can have similar effects on similar problems with imilar causes. One or other or both may be most effective in any given case. The dangerous fallacy is to assume that one should or can try to split all these problems into "pychological' and "organic" and try to determine appropriate treatment accordingly. Of course, cauation is often important in determining appropriate teatments, but a simplistic psychological vs. brain disorder dichotomy is not the way to think clearly here.
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