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Valenstein is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan, a biopsychologist who spent over 40 years studying “how the brain and other biological factors such as hormones and drugs influence behavior” (p. 6). He is not a psychotherapist, and in principle he is not against the idea of viewing and treating mental disorders from within a biological framework. (He does believe, though, that there is a need for a psychosocial component also—more of that later.)
Originally he had set out to write a history of the interplay between the accidental discoveries of psychotherapeutic drugs and the set of scientific, psychosocial, and economic factors that within only a few decades had led to the drastic, wide-spread changes from practices that reflected a more or less psychodynamic orientation to those arising from the conviction that chemical events in the brain are “not only the cause of mental disorders, but also the explanation of the normal variations in personality and behavior” (p. 1).
As he gathered material for his project, however, Valenstein noticed a recurring general pattern of scientifically and medically unacceptable work apparently abetted by a constellation of shoddy motives. Consequently, he expanded his plan to include questions concerning evaluation and motivation, such as: Does the evidence support the received views concerning the biological causes of disorders? Does it support the new biochemical theories of mental illnesses and the drug treatment approaches that evolved in the context of these theories? Who benefits from