> "Low serotonin" was never the actual medical position on why antidepressants worked, it was marketing. The medical position is "we don't know why they work";

> "Low serotonin" was never the actual medical position on why antidepressants worked, it was marketing. The medical position is "we don't know why they work"; some antidepressants actually lower serotonin (SNRI) and some increase it (SSRI) and they both seem to help. This just isn't the case. Maybe the more accurate thing to say is that there have been a few "medical positions" on this issue in the past six to eight decades, and "low serotonin" as well as "we don't know how they work" were both out there in the ether. But even that's not fully accurate, because you'd have to be pretty bold to argue that there wasn't a dominant "medical position" on the matter since biological psychiatry finished supplanting the Freudians for control of the field in the 1970s. The dominant position was the chemical imbalance theory, of which "low serotonin" was one of several variations trotted out over the years to both the public and the medical community. Psychiatry is one of the medical specialties most profoundly co-opted by pharmaceutical industry interests, and both research and clinical practice have been rife with the effects of this influence. You don't even have to appeal to systematic analyses of how profoundly poor the quality of psychiatric research is, or how much pharma ghostwrites those studies, or anything of the kind. You can just ask a researcher in cancer or in neurology; they'll happily tell you. To cleave the "medical position" from "marketing", as in your comment, elides what really happened: marketing decided what the medical position would be, and both doctors and the public mostly bought it.