Kenneth R. Miller’s late father was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1950s – leading to despair, distress, and, eventually, hospitalisation. Then psychiatrists prescribed him with psychotropic drugs.
“His mental illness just melted away,” recalls Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and author of The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness and Free Will. “My dad often told me it was a great relief to him to know that the symptoms of his mental illness were caused not by some personal or moral defect but by a chemical imbalance in his brain, which these drugs helped to correct.”
The episode remains for Miller a very personal example of one fact: that our mind, he believes,
