Actual title of the article, quoting the main author of the Nature op-ed. There has been a steady stream of recent studies challenging that depression is due to “faulty genes”, and even less so due to low serotonin in the brain. If anything, the available evidence so far strongly implicates high serotonin as the cause and not the cure for depression. More importantly, this most recent publication shines the light directly on environmental/social causes (e.g. chronic stress, financial insecurity/poverty, meaningless lives, etc) of depression and makes a strong case that it is those causes that need to be “treated”, not the brain itself as the brain seems to be functioning perfectly well in depressed people. Such position/opinion is anathema to both Big Pharma and public health policy, which have spent billions to shift the blame away from the crushing environment we all live in, caused by deliberate political decisions spanning decades. In other words – there is no depression as an organic disease, it is just a normal response to the drastically low quality of life we all have been experiencing for decades, and which continue to deteriorate daily. So, the solution is (and has always been) political, not pharmacological. I sense that a revolution is brewing and we may witness it play out globally in the coming months/years.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02462-3
Researchers: Depression Is “A Normal Brain Responding to Stress or Adversity”
“…“Difficult lives explain depression better than broken brains,” according to researchers in a recent letter to the editor in Molecular Psychiatry. The authors, led by Joanna Moncrieff, argue that there is no real evidence for brain differences in depression but that there is convincing evidence of the role of social and environmental factors as a cause. “We suggest that in the absence of convincing proof of a pathological process, it is more likely that depression is part of the range of emotional reactions to the circumstances of life that are typical of humans,” write Moncrieff et al. “We agree that mental activity arises from brain activity, but it seems more likely that depression is the result not of a faulty brain but rather a normal brain responding to stress or adversity: in other words, a behavioral state best understood at the level of the mind (that is, the thoughts, feelings, and actions of human beings in their social context) and not of the brain,” they add.”
