I even take issue with the premise: “psychiatry rightly saw mental illness as rooted in biology, more specifically in the brain.” This statement is far from t

I even take issue with the premise: “psychiatry rightly saw mental illness as rooted in biology, more specifically in the brain.” This statement is far from the big picture, imho. We've identified that the bulk of neurons rests below the brain, that hormones are being produced elsewhere (e.g. around the heart, or the intestine) that have a dramatic effect on conditions like depression (or lack thereof). See The Second Brain[1] by Michael D. Gershon for a primer on your intestine. I personally think reducing mental life to the brain is just as shortsighted as reducing a computer to its CPU: sure, you can do CS with such abstractions, but not deal with real-life implementation. It's paper-theory, not applied practice. And purely abstract models have a way of not wanting to fit reality as well as we'd wish... Ideas that we are what we eat (quite literally so), or that physical exercise helps mental strength, tend to show that even for processes seemingly 'happening' locally in the brain, the whole neural system and by extension the whole body plays a part (if only as "infrastructure", but possibly more so in an "edge / core" fashion — aren't we but a big IS after all like any living system, however esoteric to us the physical processes). Anyway, not a neuroscientist, maybe just a cheeky dev who likes to challenge ideas, but the whole fantasized body/mind dichotomy is only furthered when we say "oh it's all physical but it's only the brain that affects mental/mind processes". You've just moved the magic black-box from "otherworldly" to "physically located in the brain" — that's better, but not quite there yet. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/636974.The_Second_Brain https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/636974.The_Second_Brain