Chemical Imbalance | Slate Star Codex

[content note: mental illness. I am still in training and do not understand these issues even as well as a fully-trained psychiatrist, let alone a researcher, so take all the biology and studies in here with a grain of salt until you double-check] I. IO9’s new article The Most Popular Antidepressants Are Based On An Outdated Theory jumps on a popular bandwagon of criticizing psychiatry for botching the “chemical imbalance” theory. See for example The New Yorker, BBC, The New York Times, and various books (…and also The Myth Of Chemical Imbalance, Debunking The Chemical Imbalance Myth, The Chemical Imbalance Fraud, and Depression Delusion, The Myth Of The Chemical Imbalance, etc) According to all these sources psychiatry sold the public on antidepressants by claiming depression was just a chemical imbalance (usually fleshed out as “a simple deficiency of serotonin”) and so it was perfectly natural to take extra chemicals to correct it. However, they had no real evidence for this theory

[content note: mental illness. I am still in training and do not understand these issues even as well as a fully-trained psychiatrist, let alone a researcher, so take all the biology and studies in here with a grain of salt until you double-check] I. IO9’s new article The Most Popular Antidepressants Are Based On An Outdated Theory jumps on a popular bandwagon of criticizing psychiatry for botching the “chemical imbalance” theory. See for example The New Yorker, BBC, The New York Times, and various books (…and also The Myth Of Chemical Imbalance, Debunking The Chemical Imbalance Myth, The Chem