I think we're in agreement, but perhaps I wasn't precise enough in my phrasing. I mean we know what they do chemically, but as you said we have no idea what se

I think we're in agreement, but perhaps I wasn't precise enough in my phrasing. I mean we know what they do chemically, but as you said we have no idea what serotonin does. (Which is not true, but it's so complicated that what we know just makes us exhausted thinking about how truly complicated it is.) > We don't know whether the brain chemistry changes we see in depression are the cause of the disease, or just the way 'sadness'/'lack of motivation' looks like neuro-chemically. Indeed. Though it's always both. And probably asking whether we could, let's say take a pill every day as prevention seems unfathomable, because so far - again, just as you said - we don't really know what is depression. It's basically too much of feeling down. Feeling down when you shouldn't really be feeling that down, at least somehow "compared" to other people. So it's hard to know when prevention should start and when it's just normal case of the mondays. However, just as with the nurture-nature conundrum it seems natural to treat it as one thing very tightly coupled with the other. Which makes it likely that any kind of treatment and understanding has to always handle both in a lockstep. (Even if there are a lot of subgroups, some are more susceptible on the chemistry side, some more on the cognitive side, some are simply resilient enough to deal with it with some light touch counseling, some got a very bad ticket in life and need a whole support network to keep the darkness at bay, etc.)