A lot of people (eg on Reddit) seem to believe that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” and that the solution is antidepressant drugs. That’s a bit different from the “positive attitude” case but also something that might be disagreed with.
The drugs we have today are not a good solution. I’ve suffered from depression myself and have been prescribed many different drugs at times. The best match was still only a partial solution. I’ve read enough to know that this is pretty typical: few people get ‘total remission’ from depression on psychiatric drugs alone. Most have some degree of improvement, but have to try many drugs first (i.e. there’s no good prediction of a drug will do to a person) and usually have at least minor side effects (i.e. the drugs are not very specific in their action).
It’s hard to argue that some hypothetical not-yet-invented drug might be a perfect cure to depression; that’s just one step removed from the truism that our minds are our brains and so susceptible to neurochemical intervention.
I am assign a pretty high likelihood that what we call depression is in fact several distinct disorders that merely present similar symptoms, and that for this reason we are never going to get really effective treatment’s for depression until we get better diagnostics. It would explain why people have such varying drug responses—if you have depression type a and get medication effective for depression type d…
A lot of people (eg on Reddit) seem to believe that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” and that the solution is antidepressant drugs. That’s a bit different from the “positive attitude” case but also something that might be disagreed with.
The drugs we have today are not a good solution. I’ve suffered from depression myself and have been prescribed many different drugs at times. The best match was still only a partial solution. I’ve read enough to know that this is pretty typical: few people get ‘total remission’ from depression on psychiatric drugs alone. Most have some degree of improvement, but have to try many drugs first (i.e. there’s no good prediction of a drug will do to a person) and usually have at least minor side effects (i.e. the drugs are not very specific in their action).
It’s hard to argue that some hypothetical not-yet-invented drug might be a perfect cure to depression; that’s just one step removed from the truism that our minds are our brains and so susceptible to neurochemical intervention.
I am assign a pretty high likelihood that what we call depression is in fact several distinct disorders that merely present similar symptoms, and that for this reason we are never going to get really effective treatment’s for depression until we get better diagnostics. It would explain why people have such varying drug responses—if you have depression type a and get medication effective for depression type d…