Biochemistry, Suicide, and History

Biochemistry, Suicide, and History: Possibilities and Problems Historians who study behavior have been offered new challenges and opportunities by recent claims of neuropathology. Much current research in biochemistry attempts to explain particular types of behavior, such as violence or depression, as the result of malfunctions or abnormalities in those chemical messengers in the brain called neurotransmitters. Historians and other social scientists, ill-equipped to deal with biochemistry, tend either to ignore or reject such explanations. However, much of American society, from granting agencies to courts of law, appears not only willing, but also anxious to accept explanations of social behavior as physiologically based.1 This research note demonstrates the need to place the claims of behavioral neuropathology in an epidemiological and historical context and speculates on how an epidemiologically and historically informed biochemical approach might offer new tools for social historians. Those interested in biochemical explanations for human behavior must concern themselves more fully than they have with the diets of the populations that they investigate. In I98I, newspapers throughout the United States reported that scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health in Be

Sociology · History of Science and Medicine · Psychology

• Madness, Neurasthenia, and "Modernity"

  Open Access•Paulo Drinot•Latin American Research Review•2004

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