In a recent review, researchers Deidre M. Anglin and Francesca Selloni chart a compelling case for expanding our understanding of psychosis by integrating biological, psychological, and social factors. Their work, published in Psychiatric Services, draws from the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) framework and connects psychosis risk to neighborhood-level factors, including ethnic density, structural racism, and social exclusion.
“Biopsychosocial theoretical models of mental health risk and protection postulate the importance of integrating multiple domains of influence, including biological, psychological, and social areas, to fully understand individual mental health,” the authors write. “Over the past few decades, however, these domains have often been siloed, with resources prioritized toward research in biological psychiatry.”
This research underscores the urgent need to move beyond biologically reductionist models of psychosis by exposing how structural racism, social exclusion, and neighborhood inequality shape both mental distress and brain development. In doing so, this model refutes a false binary between biology and social context, demonstrating how structural forces like racism and exclusion become biologically embedded.
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When it comes to the mind (and even emotions) biology is the LEAST important path of interest. These authors belie their materialist bias by mentioning brain development. That’s biology. The mind IS NOT a biological entity. Until people interested in psychology (human, animal or plant) realize this, they will never make any important progress.
Social factors on Earth, as violent and sadistic as they may be, can only be triggers to what already exists in the mind, which is there due to a variety of factors that don’t really exist on Earth at this time. If we ever hope to catch up our social understandings and “social sciences” with our technology (physical world) understandings, we MUST move past this mental barrier and confront what we are really up against.
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Psychosis doesn’t exist in the objective scientific sense because a great of what is considered ‘psychotic’ has a great deal to do with culture and politics.
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Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of the noösphere comes to mind.
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Perhaps it’d be wise to acknowledge the likely number one cause of “psychosis”? … the anticholinergic drugs, themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxidrome
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