3 ms·

I think depression is a beast with many intersecting roads. The chemical imbalance seems like it could be more the result of something than the root cause.

• marxidad 10y ago
  Even if that is the case, if the root cause is just some triggering event, then the chemical imbalance can still remain even if the cause is no longer present.
• perfectfire 10y ago
  I'm just one person, but it really doesn't seem like that to me. There was no awful situation or experience that brought on my depression or continues to make me depressed. I call that situational depression. You aren't clinically depressed. You're just feeling really crappy because your situation is really crappy. Remove the crappy situation or improve it in some meaningful way and the depression goes away too. With clinical depression there is no trigger or "something" that makes you depressed. You could be in a great situation with nothing bad happening and you're still depressed. Right now I'm in a situation that really weighs heavily on me. Yet I'm not depressed.
  • deleted 10y ago
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• sundarurfriend 10y ago
  What you're referring to is, I believe, proximal causes and distal causes. Distal causes in depression's case maybe stuff like sleep deprivation, overstressed immune system, gut biome issues, etc. (and possibly genetic elements, who knows!) with little known about how they cause it or how they interact/overlap with one another. The immediate proximal cause is, of course, the "chemical imbalance", which is popsci speak for neurotransmitter issues (among possibly others), a higher level proximal cause might be a life event that somehow causes some 'critical mass threshold' leading a spiraling avalanche (though again, little is known at the biological level about why this is so, assuming it is so.)