3 ms·
I'm not arguing, but for a person suffering from depression, who of the following is right? A. People saying "It's all in your head" and reducing depression to
by maratc 5y ago
I'm not arguing, but for a person suffering from depression, who of the following is right?
A. People saying "It's all in your head" and reducing depression to a non-biological condition (which is not very helpful at best), or
B. Doctors saying "Here, have a pill" and reducing depression to a biological condition?
I think that we still don't know, and maybe it's a bit of both, or maybe neither. But TLA seems to go with the first group, hence my comment.
- el_nahual 5y agoI must have not done a good job explaining. Of course depression is a biological condition (because the mind emerges from the brain). That doesn't mean it's a single condition with a single cause or even a group of pathological causes, the way cancer is, or MLS. But yes, of course it's biological. What an intellectually honest psychiatrist would say is something like "look, you're not doing well. Here are some things we can try to shift the playing field a bit. We don't know exactly how they work or why, but we know they do work, somewhat. Want to try? Here's the side effects: " That would be intellectually honest. Saying "you have A (single, diagnosed) disease, caused by "a chemical imbalance", and the root cause of that disease is treated by this medicine" is dishonest.
- maratc 5y agoOk, but if "depression is a biological condition" — I understand we don't know the details — would you agree with what is said in TLA, that "[t]here is no depression Gremlin, either"? The biological condition — that we can't test for yet — seems for me to be exactly that "depression Gremlin".