Problem with SSRIs is: Does depression cause reduced serotonin, or does reduced serotonin cause depression?
A recent paper [0], [1] claims there is no connection between reduced serotonin as a cause of depression.
Which in my book says depression is a software problem more than a hardware problem, even though the software problem can create reinforcing hardware problems.
This is a mischaracterization of the research. Recent research has indicated that Serotonin levels in depressed people are not lower than average. But SSRIs are effective for relieving depressive symptoms - either boosting serotonin levels above average works, or they work through some other pathway that hasn't been identified.
> Which in my book says depression is a software problem more than a hardware problem, even though the software problem can create reinforcing hardware problems.
A human isn't a computer. You can't separate psychology from the biology of the brain. This comment is really unhelpful in actually treating mental illness. Talk therapy helps depression, lifestyle changes help depression, and medication helps depression. Most people recover with some combination of all three.
I've never understood people who seem to take offense to the existence of antidepressants. If you don't want to take them, don't take them, but leave the people who benefit from them in peace.
> Recent research has indicated that Serotonin levels in depressed people are not lower than average. But SSRIs are effective for relieving depressive symptoms - either boosting serotonin levels above average works, or they work through some other pathway that hasn't been identified.
But that is exactly the point. If we don't know why something works, we can't even be sure that it does work.
Also SSRIs are only slightly more effective than placebo. [0]
Quote: "So, when we accessed the public domain data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) archives for the antidepressants approved between 1985 and 1997 (7), it quickly became apparent that many of the assumptions about the relative potency of antidepressants compared to placebo were not based on data from the contemporary trials but from an earlier era. Specifically, it became evident that the magnitude of symptom reduction was about 40% with antidepressants and about 30% with placebo."
Until/unless we can finally understand how the human endocrine system works, on both a broad statistical basis as well as on a predictable individual basis (i.e. in the same sense that statistically we know that X number of people die each year in automobile collisions but we don't know exactly WHICH people will die) we are making guesses.
The level of scientism our society exhibits - in which we cannot just accept that some things don't have answers that we can access at this time, and instead accept any answer "science" gives us - is unfortunate. Research we do is limited by what we look for, and the positivist approach we see in medicine ("Find diseases we can make money on") limits everything.
A recent paper [0], [1] claims there is no connection between reduced serotonin as a cause of depression.
Which in my book says depression is a software problem more than a hardware problem, even though the software problem can create reinforcing hardware problems.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2022...
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/what-causes-depression-not-low-seroton...