We believe brain imaging may be the next big “discovery” psychiatry makes to convince people they have a chemical imbalance that causes them to behave a certain way. The word is getting out that no lab test exists to show a chemical imbalance when a psychiatric drug is prescribed, so the field of psychiatry is trying to produce one. Once the cost of brain imaging systems comes down enough to reach critical mass, this may be the silver bullet test on which psychiatry will hang their claims.

Here is a good overview of brain imaging in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_imaging, and PET scans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_scan. This source has some good pictures showing what a PET scan looks like: http://www.bocaradiology.com/Procedures/PET.html.

CT Scans (“CAT” scans) and MRI scans can only show the brain’s structure to help identify physical tissue abnormalities. They have proven very useful at detecting true medical problems like brain tumors and abnormalities caused by Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, stroke, and other medical problems. But they cannot measure functional aspects of the brain like fMRIs, PET and SPECT scans can.

fMRIs, or functional MRIs, show differences in blood flow and blood oxygenation in the brain that are believed to be associated with various thoughts and actions. This brain-imaging technique helps us better understand how our thoughts and actions may be coupled with specific areas of the brain.

PET scans use radioactive chemicals (“radiotracers”) injected into the blood stream, distributed throughout the brain, and bound to targeted areas (like the neuroreceptors dopamine and serotonin) to measure blood flow, oxygen and glucose metabolism, which determines tissue health. PET’s most common clinical application is in the detection of cancerous tumors in the body and brain.

SPECT scans are similar to PET scans, but use a gamma camera for imaging and whose capabilities are more limited (lower resolution and slower process). They are cheaper than PET machines and so are more commonly found in doctor’s offices than PET.

What ALL of these brain-imaging tests CANNOT measure, however, is the amount of a particular chemical between the synapses of nerve cells. Claims of a chemical imbalance in your brain simply cannot be proven using brain images. Areas lit up or not lit up in a brain scan don’t tell you exactly how much of a certain chemical like serotonin is required for your brain to function correctly, because no one knows what the normal amount is. Furthermore, no one knows how much of a chemical is too little or too much, and how much of a medication is needed to correct it—the prescription becomes trial-and-error guesswork. Even if we did know the normal chemical levels in the brain, we still don’t understand how brain chemicals and blood flow determine mental health (vice versa, we do understand something about how mental health determines physical and brain health—more on this later).

But that doesn’t stop psychiatrists like Dr. Daniel Amen (Newport Beach, CA), author of books on brain imaging, from performing 28,000 SPECT scans on adults and children over the past 14 years. In a recent article, he admitted, “the images helped convince people that behavior problems had a biological basis and needed treatment with drugs and other therapies… They increase compliance with treatment and decrease the shame and guilt.” They also bring in more than $1,000 per scan.

In the name of big business, psychiatrists like Dr. Amen will not admit that these tests fail to show evidence of chemically imbalanced brains and their effect on mental disorders. Why? Because if my brain isn’t chemically imbalanced, then I don’t need a prescription for a chemical balancer. And if I don’t need a prescription, then psychiatrists go out of business. Lack of proof of chemical imbalances causing mental disorders is still, and will always be, the missing link and the mythical foundation upon which the entire industry stands.

Another thought – we believe that the mind controls the brain. God gave us a free will. We are not pre-programmed robots or animals whose brains control our minds. We are not slaves to our brains, as psychiatry’s evolutionary viewpoint contends, but our brains are slaves to us—unless of course the brain has a true injury, then we become slaves to the extent of the brains' injuries. The same is true when we ingest a psychiatric drug that alters our brain chemistry—we become slaves to the drug’s side effects and withdrawal symptoms.

So if the mind controls the (uninjured/unmedicated) brain, then any brain changes detected by brain scans should be an EFFECT of the mind’s activities (personality, emotions, intellect, etc.). Take Psalm 32:3-4 as a biblical case in point. David's bones wasted away after he hid his sin from God. His mental issues caused problems with his physical bones. He didn't attribute his adultery to bad bones, and he didn't blame his adultery on his chemical imbalance!

Here are some other verses that support the theory that our mental and spiritual life controls our physical well being to a large extent (real physical disease excluded):

Psa 32:3 When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.

Psa 38:3 [There is] no soundness in my flesh because of thine anger; neither [is there any] rest in my bones because of my sin.

Pro 3:8 (The fear of the Lord) shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones.

Pro 14:30 A sound heart [is] the life of the flesh: but envy the rottenness of the bones.

Pro 16:24 Pleasant words [are as] an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.

Pro 17:22 A merry heart doeth good [like] a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.

Bones in these verses refer to the physical body.

From a scientific perspective, the mind-controls-the-brain theory has also been proven in medical practice by none other than brain imaging technology. This excerpt from an article written by Dr. David Cohen in the Spring 2004 issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior shows that our mental life can have a profound affect on our physical condition, including the condition of our brains:

Post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans and victims of child abuse causes smaller hippocampi and abnormal amygdale activation. Amputation studies show that function is necessary for (brain) structure to develop. These examples show that behavior, experience, and function can alter and determine brain structure. This has fundamental implications especially for psychiatric research, given that psychiatric disorders are characterized and defined by deviation from normal functioning.

The assertion that “mind controls brain” obliterates psychiatry’s biologically deterministic assumption of “brain controls mind” and makes brain-altering psychiatric drugs both irrelevant and unnecessary!

Last thought – if psychiatry really had a 100% scientific and proven link between mental disorders and chemical imbalances, you know we would hear about it, in a BIG way. Psychiatry and Big Pharma would pool their billions in profits and funnel it into development of lab test machines for every doctor’s office in America, and would have every patient tested as standard practice. But all the research to date is just conjecture, and it shows because lab tests are still mysteriously missing. All they can do is depend on subjective questionnaires of human behavior and perhaps a pretty, scientific-looking brain scan that purports to show more than it really does.

So in a nutshell, the answer to your question "No, brain imaging cannot prove a patient is depressed, has ADHD, etc. because a) brain imaging cannot measure chemical levels, b) no one knows what chemical levels equate to "normal" and "abnormal," and c) there is no proof that chemical levels are the cause of mental problems.

Hope this helps answer your questions. Thank you for caring enough to want to know the truth about these things, for the benefit of your sheep.

Footnote: For a scientific, scholarly explanation of the limitations of functional brain scans like PET and SPECT in diagnosing mental disorders, see the excellent article written by Dr. Grace E. Jackson, “A Curious Consensus: ‘Brain Scans Prove Disease’?” at  http://psychrights.org/Articles/GEJacksonMDBrainScanCuriousConsensus.pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)

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