Posted by chumbawumba on May 11, 2009, at 16:47:28
In reply to Re: Antidepressants Hardly Help ?????????, posted by SLS on May 11, 2009, at 15:11:05
>Someone with no biological depression can certainly be chronically depressed because of a multitude of psychological and emotional reasons. This is precisely the part of the population of treatment-seeking people who must be EXCLUDED rather than included. I contend that these subpopulations DO NOT suffer from having a biological illness that should be the target of these investigations.
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I think all depression is biological in that a depressed persons brain is physically different, on the cellular level and the gross anatomic level. Regardless of etiology.I think what you are saying is that study inclusion criteria should be made even more narrow so as to only include people who have a genetic proclivity for depression. Pure depressives so to speak. People who just seem to be depressed for no apparent reason. Who are born that way. Is that right or am I putting words in your mouth?
I suppose that would be helpful in that you kind of isolate one subset and focus on treating the root cause and eliminate confounds. I'm not sure how you would do it other than genetic testing and I don't think those test exist yet.
But I think this group of "pure depressives" would be a rather small segment. What about the rest of us? People who might not be homozygous (pure depressives) but heterozygous. Maybe we have some genetic vulnerability, but we were beaten as children or bullied. Or went through a bad marriage, or drink too much, or have Axis II personality features, or a co-morbid medical condition.
This is the larger group of people I suspect. And I think it would probably help a greater number of people to find treatments for us heterozygotes than it would to find treatments for the pure homozygote. Homozygotes being less common in a population almost by definition.
(I'm using the single gene dominant-recessive model for depression here, I know its not that simple)
poster:chumbawumba
thread:895119
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090505/msgs/895207.html