[shkkmo]

The issues is that we are missing the "why" of how most antidepressants work... so do they also qualify as pseudoscience?

In my mind, psuedoscience isn't just missing the "why/how it works" but also the "who/when it helps" and as a result don't have clear statistical backing.

[wizzwizz4]

We know the why is “because the antidepressants were taken”. But antidepressants only work sometimes – different antidepressants work for different people! We don't know the true, fundamental reason, but at least we've pinned it down a bit.

I call something pseudoscience when the “why” is “pinned down” as something wholly unrelated, and the people involved haven't noticed; if they were doing science instead of just theorising, they would've noticed.

(We agree, but we're using different words.)

[shkkmo]

> We know the why is “because the antidepressants were taken”.

We don't know that. The best we know is that people who take antidepressants on average experience more improvement than a placebo. We actually don't know who got better from taking antidepressants due to the placebo effect.

> I call something pseudoscience when the “why” is “pinned down” as something wholly unrelated, and the people involved haven't noticed;

This is a good point and I would agree that pseudosciences are generally bad at uncovering bad explanations. I will point out that the "chemical imbalance" theory is still widely believed even though it has been pretty thoroughly debunked.

I think the dichotomy science/pseudoscience if often applied to whole fields when there is often a mix of both within any given field. The prevelence can certainly be highly variable from field to field but it isn't as black and white as we like to suggest.