The "serotonin model", actually called the monoamine hypothesis, hasn't really been taken seriously in the field for decades, except by naysayers like yourself who continue to use it as a strawman.
I see patients still take it seriously because of the heavy marketing of Zoloft in particular.
The drugs are literally have serotonin in the name.
I still hear people regularly refer to mental health problems being due to a "Chemical imbalance", often as a way to defend their use of pharmaceuticals and dismiss the efficacy of any other intervention. It's that they see people justify a non-falsifiable in the efficacy of the current course of treatment. It's that it's hard enough to convince people who have been on SSRI's for decades and are doing badly to take a month to ween off them, a month to see how things go, and a month to get back on them. If they believe their brains are fundamentally broken without evidence it's just about impossible.
It's that when a sixth of American women have taken anti-d's in the past month, and the most popular explanation as to why is they have broken brains that need to be treated with medicine, as if their problems must all be due to some genetic issue or whatever, I find it abhorrent.
I don't know, it pisses me off that these drugs are popular largely due to a mythology and how difficult they are to stop more than they're efficacious is all (not that they are not efficacious). It's not that psychiatrists don't know this theory isn't true, I'm well aware the theory has been well known to lack support for a long time in medical circles, it's that they don't effectively inform their patients.
Medicine should stop calling them "SSRIs" if the SSRI part is a tangential side-effect, better educate patients on the fact that medicine doesn't really know why the drugs work, or even if a given patient will respond to them better than placebo. Governments should ban pharmaceutical advertisements because they make people sick and misinformed.
SSRIs are popular because they are effective and safer than older antidepressants. And what depression interventions are incompatible with SSRIs but other drugs not understood completely also?
What should SSRIs be called if the SSRI part is how they work indirectly? What would you call them now? And SNRIs? And MAOIs?
I mean this without sarcasm, but congratulations on your deployment the phrase "strawman" being one of the only uses I've ever seen that makes sense, and not using it as cop out to avoid responding to a valid metaphor/ anecdote
> hasn't really been taken seriously in the field for decades, except by naysayers like yourself who continue to use it as a strawman.
…and by basically the entire general public. Big pharma did a great job on the “depression is a just a chemical imbalance…” awareness campaign, but absolutely dropped the ball on the “actually we were wrong about that” campaign, so that’s still what most members of the public tend to believe.
The reason it’s outdated in this case is because the pharmaceutical industry invested so much money and time into selling Prozac to the public, for a treatment that was ultimately ineffective, and then of course invested no money at all into correcting the public’s subsequent misunderstanding. So unlike what you’ve claimed, this isn’t a concept taken seriously only by naysayers who want to use it as a strawman. It’s a concept many members of the public generally believe to be true, because the experts spent so much time and money telling them it was.
There seem to be practitioners still taking this seriously, and I expect them to continue to do so until they die. According to this article from 2022 it's still "influential": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
Yes, and psychiatrists never believed it was "low serotonin" at all, or at least claim to have never believed it.
For ADHD, stimulants actually do treat it by fixing "low dopamine"… in specific areas of the brain. But "low dopamine" is also a description of Parkinson's disease.
But SSRIs don't work like stimulants do; they take a lot more than half an hour to take effect. We don't actually know how SSRIs work in the people where they do work.
> But SSRIs don't work like stimulants do; they take a lot more than half an hour to take effect.
Sorry, need to be an anecdote for you. Prozac makes me manic in about 5 hours. We know how SSRIs work, the problem is they are treating a symptom not the cause of depression which is immune dysfunction.
If SSRIs did not increase serotonin there would be no risk of them causing serotonin syndrome, and they do.
"The role of immune dysfunction in BD is currently unclear, with low-grade chronic inflammation (increased plasma cytokines, soluble cytokine receptors, chemokines, acute phase reactants) and T-cell activation features that may be associated with BD, but the results are controversial"
If this is your best citation, then I don't know why you expect everyone to know about and be confident in this theory. And that's without even questioning whether bipolar and depression are the same thing.
Your search results are all over the place and don't show anything coherent.
The drugs are literally have serotonin in the name.
I still hear people regularly refer to mental health problems being due to a "Chemical imbalance", often as a way to defend their use of pharmaceuticals and dismiss the efficacy of any other intervention. It's that they see people justify a non-falsifiable in the efficacy of the current course of treatment. It's that it's hard enough to convince people who have been on SSRI's for decades and are doing badly to take a month to ween off them, a month to see how things go, and a month to get back on them. If they believe their brains are fundamentally broken without evidence it's just about impossible.
It's that when a sixth of American women have taken anti-d's in the past month, and the most popular explanation as to why is they have broken brains that need to be treated with medicine, as if their problems must all be due to some genetic issue or whatever, I find it abhorrent.
I don't know, it pisses me off that these drugs are popular largely due to a mythology and how difficult they are to stop more than they're efficacious is all (not that they are not efficacious). It's not that psychiatrists don't know this theory isn't true, I'm well aware the theory has been well known to lack support for a long time in medical circles, it's that they don't effectively inform their patients.
Medicine should stop calling them "SSRIs" if the SSRI part is a tangential side-effect, better educate patients on the fact that medicine doesn't really know why the drugs work, or even if a given patient will respond to them better than placebo. Governments should ban pharmaceutical advertisements because they make people sick and misinformed.