No treatment of depression will be meaningful without acknowledging that this a "wastebasket" diagnosis, calling at least a half dozen disorders one name.<p>Practicing psychiatrists can determine which one or ones you have only by seeing what medications seem to help.
Commentary by one of the authors <a href="https://twitter.com/markhoro/status/1549692299025813504?s=21&t=lHbJigSmMJ5ILwyRLN2EBQ" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/markhoro/status/1549692299025813504?s=21...</a>
I suspect it comes down to the difference between the two questions (a) Whether SSRI"s a/d meds work (b) Why/How they work.<p>Clearly these things help many people.
But not everyone and may even be harmful in some cases. Why, now that we don't seem to have really high quality answers on.
While the conclusions make sense, it's weird that we have gotten to a point of meta-analysis of existing "systematic and meta analyses". How much further removed from the data can we go without the "error" accumulating and making any such meta analysis useless?
TLDR: This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression. This is consistent with research on many other biological markers [21]. We suggest it is time to acknowledge that the serotonin theory of depression is not empirically substantiated.
> Poverty, insecure work, sexism, racism, interpersonal conflict, etc all clearly associate with depression. The vast sums of money spent on looking for the chemical equation of low mood might be missing the forest for the trees<p>Finally. Finally finally finally. I had a therapist my first go-around tell me, when I asked if I should be on medication, that “sometimes people are depressed because their life just sucks, so let’s see if that’s the case before we consider a chemical intervention.” And he was right.