Posted by ed_uk2010 on August 16, 2010, at 16:34:20
In reply to Re: Treatment Resistant Depression. » ed_uk2010, posted by sigismund on August 14, 2010, at 19:14:31
>I said to my shrink that the neurotransmitter hypothesis was dead and he perked up immediately...
Well yeah, depression is complex. Depression is not a single condition, it's a group of conditions which have similar symptoms. There are probably many different causes. Anyone who claims that 'depression is caused by low serotonin' clearly has no idea what they are talking about. Even if a subset of patients were found to have low serotonin (difficult to measure), this obviously won't apply to everyone. SSRIs are known to be effective for a proportion of cases of depression. This does not, however, prove that low serotonin was the cause of their illness. This sort of backwards logic is not very scientific. Opioids are effective for pain but that doesn't mean that the pain was caused by low endorphins!
poster:ed_uk2010
thread:958488
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20100811/msgs/958845.html