Whenever we puzzle over why something happened we rarely say, 'No one knows,' and leave it at that. Rather we make up some theory — a guess — about the cause of that event. This happens all the time in medicine and psychiatry, but unfortunately these guesses are often presented to patients as known facts. Many depressed people have been told that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and few doctors have gone on to explain that this is a theory, not a fact, because no one knows what a chemically unbalanced brain is. Some doctors will also say that antidepressants put the chemical imbalance right. This clearly cannot be the case for, as the scientist Susan Greenfield has often explained, antidepressant drugs have an immediate effect on the functioning of the brain, yet any antidepressant effect is not felt for ten days or so. Clearly something else is taking place, but as yet no one knows what that is. Some doctors tell patients that antidepressant drugs, especially the latest drugs, the SSRIs, target certain parts of the brain, but scientists who study the brain say that this is not so. Drugs which affect the brain affect all of the brain.
Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison (1983)
Use the link below to read the The Real Causes of Depression, an essay by Australian psychologist DOROTHY ROWE in which she argues that depression is not the product of 'a chemical imbalance in the brain' as is widely touted by the medical profession and drug companies — a hypothesis now accepted (though not publicly) by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Institute of Psychiatry:
https://www.dorothyrowe.com.au/articles/item/192-the-real-causes-of-depression-february-2007
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