7 ms·

This is a little unfair to _Listening to Prozac_, which was raising speculation about SSRIs effect on trophic and atrophic factors back in the 90s. In fact it’s

This is a little unfair to _Listening to Prozac_, which was raising speculation about SSRIs effect on trophic and atrophic factors back in the 90s. In fact it’s unclear whether anyone ever believed in the catecholamine hypothesis (excepting simplified accounts for marketing or doctor-patient communication), and it’s been for decades now a cottage industry to disprove it in favor of something ele. It’s on the other hand disturbing that there’s talk of broadening the term “depression”, when it really needs narrowing. There’s such a thing as a medical condition “depression” that one might as well define as “responds to antidepressants” and then there’s everything else — the invisible boundary accounting for how little effectiveness antidepressants have at large. It’s a damn shame that we don’t have the means of diagnosing it (whereasw Kraepelin developed the bipolar/schizophrenia differential diagnosis before Freud even arrived on the scene). Overall this article does nothing to inform or educate.

opportune 4y ago
Depression and anxiety may as well be the cough and fever of the mental health world. We can certainly treat cough and fever symptoms but that is quite different from treating the underlying condition. I think the big problem is we probably have a lot of recent societal/cultural changes which at least contribute to depression and anxiety, but are very hard to detect because of near universal adoption + too many confounding variables when examining holdout populations. Thinking of things like diet (and trace chemicals, pesticides), sleep habits, screen usage (internet, social media, porn, passive media, games), caffeine, etc. Somewhere in those areas, IMO, likely lie very large causal contributors to all of the reportedly increasing mental health problems we are seeing. I can also speak from personal experience that I had very debilitating depression/anxiety as an adolescent which has since greatly leveled off but not quite cleared. While I could likely still be diagnosed with depression now, to me the two states comparing now vs then are so wildly, qualitatively different that I am convinced they represent different underlying pathologies. What I have now feels more like the same thing that most other malcontents seem to have.

opportune 4y ago

Depression and anxiety may as well be the cough and fever of the mental health world. We can certainly treat cough and fever symptoms but that is quite different from treating the underlying condition. I think the big problem is we probably have a lot of recent societal/cultural changes which at least contribute to depression and anxiety, but are very hard to detect because of near universal adoption + too many confounding variables when examining holdout populations. Thinking of things like diet (and trace chemicals, pesticides), sleep habits, screen usage (internet, social media, porn, passive media, games), caffeine, etc. Somewhere in those areas, IMO, likely lie very large causal contributors to all of the reportedly increasing mental health problems we are seeing. I can also speak from personal experience that I had very debilitating depression/anxiety as an adolescent which has since greatly leveled off but not quite cleared. While I could likely still be diagnosed with depression now, to me the two states comparing now vs then are so wildly, qualitatively different that I am convinced they represent different underlying pathologies. What I have now feels more like the same thing that most other malcontents seem to have.