[gfosco]

I wish more people knew this. The entire "chemical imbalance" shtick is a myth. If you are ever told this, your response should be, "What chemical? What level am I at? What level should I be at?".. But, alas, there is no blood test, or any other kind of test, which can yet determine this. That's not science.

[ars]

I agree with you, but you are also losing the message.

They are trying to say it's not a matter of willpower that you can just make it go away. It's something real and outside your control.

The chemical imbalance part is nonsense, the message it implies is not.

[UK-AL]

If depression caused by terrible things happening, or loneliness, that is not also outside of your control?

I've had depressed periods, but it was completely understandable given the situation I was in.

I think the whole "chemical imbalance" is an easy fix, rather than trying to fix society, or the situation they are in. It's quick and easy to give pills rather than fix a life.

Now i'm sure they're are actual medical causes for depression, but I think its overused.

[ars]

Obviously there is depression caused by events, that type is "easy" to fix because (usually) you can fix the external events, or at least talk about them and come to terms with them.

But there is also depression caused by nothing whatsoever. Nothing detectable anyway.

People tend not to believe it can be possible, until they experience it (personally or by talking to someone who is experiencing it).

Talking about it (therapy) does nothing, because there is nothing bad happening to talk about. The person is just depressed for no reason at all, it's like someone pressed a "be depressed" switch in their brain. The person is aware of it, wants it to stop, and has no control over it at all, and no ability to change it.

It's that type that they call "chemical imbalance". The chemical imbalance part is nonsense of course, but the existence of this type of depression is not.

> but I think its overused.

In TV commercials, yes, I agree. But in real life? No, I don't think it's overused.

[UK-AL]

I think its overused, because its exactly that type of depression they tried put on me.

When in reality I was lonely, didn't have much opportunity to socialise etc.

It was only fixed when I got out that situation, basically by chance by getting a introduction into an accepting social circle. I am now very happy.

The highest sucide rates are basically in young men, basically because how society treats them. I don't think its because young men are more prone to chemical imbalances, compared to women or older people. Its because its that stage in life, when men are literally lonely because of the transition from college to work and you can end up isolated and alone.

[Tomte]

A myth?

Put yourself in my shoes: Do I believe some Internet commenter without further evidence, or do I believe Robert Sapolsky?

[Morgawr]

I don't know who Robert Sapolsky is, I admit my ignorance, but you shouldn't believe people just because they are people. You should believe peer reviewed studies instead, regardless of who writes them.

Just saying. Claiming that Robert Sapolsky himself (whoever that is) is more correct than the post you are replying to, without providing citations to (peer reviewed and accepted) studies is nonsensical.

[tedks]

> That's not science.

Science is sometimes harder than a single test.

For example, there's no blood test for autism. There's no blood test for PTSD. But my best friend's brother took years to talk to me, and sometimes still goes into rages; one of my partners would wake up in the middle of the night convinced I was trying to kill her.

Brains, minds, reinforcement learning systems, are complicated. By entirely abstract mechanisms they can be rewired to beautiful and terrible extremes. I very much doubt that the trauma that induces PTSD depends on any pre-existing biological state to allow PTSD to take hold, nor does PTSD necessarily induce some biological state (other than the biological brain-configuration that it is obviously implemented in). PTSD seems to be the best example of the human mind's ability to learn being exploited in the same way a buffer overflow exploits a browser. Obviously something is there; it's impossible to see someone flashback and deny the condition exists; but will there ever be a blood test for PTSD, or any diagnostic test more sophisticated than something like the DSM?

Psychology is not an easy science. Like physics, it depends on reverse-engineering the rules to a complex system, but that system is the human mind, and unlike physics, which exists only at a single level, to understand the mind, we have to cross levels of abstraction, much like it would be utterly futile to try to understand a program by recording the patterns it activated on the silicon of a CPU. And worse, everybody thinks they're an expert, because everyone has N years of experience dealing with human minds.

It's easy to think that any science should have a nice, clean, reductionist, petri-dish and blood-test approach. But the universe is under no obligation to make things easy. In a sense, psychology is the hardest science, because it is simply so difficult to cross these abstraction boundaries easily.

[gress]

All this is not relevant to the fact that there is no evidence for depression being caused by a chemical imbalance.

[roguecoder]

That we can fix it by changing the chemical balance is certainly evidence in support of it being caused by a chemical balance.

[zaroth]

Never mind a chemical balance being caused by depression!

[tedks]

Yes, the point of my post was not to argue for the serotonin hypothesis of depression. If you think that, might I suggest that you missed my point, and you should perhaps reread with an eye towards absorbing novel information and viewpoints rather than trying to classify literally everything as either on a FOR or AGAINST side in a binary argument?

[gress]

You were arguing that the absence of a blood test doesn't necessarily undermine chemical imbalance theories because of the complexity of the systems involved.

[tedks]

...this is still not my point. I was not addressing chemical imbalance theories at all.

Rather, I was trying to argue that the absence of a blood test doesn't make depression ascientific.

[gress]

Nobody is saying that depression is ascientific. The context of the thread was that chemical imbalance theories are ascientific.