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Researchers know that excessive doses of mood-elevating amphetamines, which greatly increase the amount of dopamine in the brain, can bring on psychotic symptoms identical to those of schizophrenia. Recent studies also have indicated that schizophrenics have 50% more dopamine in their brains than non-schizophrenics, and twice the number of dopamine receptors, the sites where the chemical locks into the central nervous system. One line of thinking is that some people are born with high dopamine levels, but that somehow an "environmental trigger," perhaps some life crisis, sets the stage for schizophrenia. But a growing opinion is that the sickness is entirely chemical. Says Matthysse: "I'd be surprised if family environment made the slightest difference."
The new breed of psychiatric researchers are also beginning to suspect the same thing about depression, the most common of mental complaints. Simple depression or temporary gloom, to be sure, may be a normal response to some unhappy experience in everyday life. But the enduring pathological kind of depression may well be entirely neurochemical. Says Wyeth Labs Psychopharmacologist Larry Stein: "The normal brain is damned adaptive. It may undergo a short-term depression when things are going bad, but it bounces back when things go well again." The serious depressive, on the other hand, he says, may be "suffering from the biology of his 'good-feeling machinery.' "
For those who fear that the new researchers are out to reduce all human emotions and problems to chemistry's atoms and molecules, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, chief of clinical psychobiology at the National Institute of Mental Health, has a tranquilizing message: "There is a chemistry of the human brain, but it acts in response to the environment." Goodwin also points out gently that brain research has not yet produced any new treatments for mental disease. In fact, the only early result expected from the research is agreement of existing antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs to eliminate side effects. Ross Baldessarini, a psychiatrist and biochemist at the Mailman Research Center, warns that chemical cures can easily be oversold, like psychoanalysis and community psychiatry. Says he: "We are not going to find the causes and cures of mental illness in the foreseeable future."
Nevertheless, the research has been impressive enough to start a rush in the direction of psychopharmacology. People with titles like biochemist, psychobiologist, neurophysiologist and psychopharmacologist are attracting scarce federal funds and replacing traditional psychiatrists as chairmen of hospital psychiatry departments. The field offers what psychiatry seems to have been yearning for all through the 1970s: scientific expertise, medical underpinnings and an escape from the troublesome subjectivity of the human mind.