ABSTRACT
I am grateful to Dennis Miehls and Jeffrey Applegate for providing me with the opportunity to express my reservations about what I have dubbed “biomania”: enthrallment with exclusively neurobiological approaches to psychiatric disorders and treatment. These reservations are embedded in a broader concern about the potential eclipse of humanism in clinical practice by an overvaluation of science and related technological approaches to mental health care. Our language is evolving accordingly. What we formerly attributed to our “human nature,” we now attribute to our “wiring” (Lieberman, 2013). To refine our practice of psychotherapy, we must identify mechanisms of change (Kazdin, 2007), and recent research is homing
in on brain changes associated with psychotherapy-the neurobiological mechanisms.
