The respondents who answered “chemical imbalance” are mostly wrong, except in very rare instances.
It may be true that certain proteins, hormones and enzyme’s are over/under produced in people with psychological issues, but that is most likely a biological response to the psyche running hot. In other words, it’s an after-effect, not a root cause. Correlation, not causation.
In my view, the answer to “what causes psychological problems” lives beneath this idea of the psyche “running hot”.
I view psychological problems as resulting from an internal battling of primary intent!!!
Consider that evolution (or God if that’s your preference) has shaped the design your entire body (an incredibly complex machine; mind included) to do certain work and achieve specific survival related goals.
Consider a few machines that were “purpose built” by mankind …
The intention of an engine is to push a car with maximum power efficiency. The intention of an auto-pilot is to navigate a plane on a direct and fuel efficient course.
Now imagine how much harder those devices need to work, if the driver is riding the brakes, or the pilot keeps turning the yoke (trying to fly the plane himself).
This “battling of primary intent”, creates a lot of heat, friction, stress, and it consumes energy that could otherwise be used to search for more optimal solutions. It creates a “double bind” inside the machine, and organic devices (machines made of meat) are intended to flow … not to wrestle with themselves.
Let’s walk through an example:
Consider the idea of ego-strength and self-love. If that’s a core need imbued by evolution (or the designer), then you can feel certain that some unconscious process in my brain is devoted to achieving it. Think of this sub-system like the auto-pilot … a device with purpose.
Now imagine that another part of mind has been infused with the idea that “being mistaken or wrong makes me unworthy of love”.
Now I’m driving with the brakes on … one part of my brain is trying to find the optimal way to achieve self-love, but another part of my brain is inhibiting and suppressing any information that contradicts my existing beliefs … denying anything that makes me “feel wrong”.
I’ve referred to this core impulse in many of my other posts as the drive toward homeostasis preservation.
Feeling wrong, coupled with the “rule” (implicit belief) that my errors makes me unlovable, creates stress and panic. And this consumes energy that is really needed to grow the natural self-love that I so desperately desire. My resistance is inhibiting (or battling with), “primary intent”.
And people on the outside are watching this process and wondering … why would person deny and suppress information that would make their life so much easier??
To outsiders who don’t understand what’s going on, this looks virtually insane. But it’s the brain doing what it was built to do → get needs met while following accepted heuristics (rules of thumb). And bad heuristics put the whole system in a double-bind!! It’s THIS EXACT PROCESS that creates psychological problems. It’s also the process behind evidence denial, conspiracy theories and fundamentalist religiosity.
It’s for this reason that I recommend EVERYONE get therapy so they can discover what implicit beliefs, and bad rules-of-thumb they are carrying unnecessarily. I swear to you that life gets so much lighter when you learn to see and reframe these unproductive and burdensome stories.