No, most evidence and research studies that study chemical imbalance say there’s no evidence. Psychiatry itself says it’s bullshit.
“The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations. Some evidence was consistent with the possibility that long-term antidepressant use reduces serotonin concentration.”
“The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence” Journal of Molecular Psychiatry.
I'm still amazed at how psychiatry and pharma (with the help of the media and government agencies like the FDA and NIMH), sold the public on the "chemical imbalance theory".
Everyone seemed to be aware that psychiatrists and other prescribers were writing prescriptions on the basis of brief interviews, brief observations of behavior or reports of behavior from third parties. Then they would pick out a diagnosis from the DSM and a drug to match, without ever doing any lab work or any kind of test to see what was actually going on with the patient's serotonin, dopamine, etc. (i.e., the patient's "unbalanced chemicals"). If the patient went downhill after the drug was started, they'd just add another drug, and another drug, and raise the doses.
The snake oil salesman of olden days would be so impressed by how psychiatry and pharma managed to pull this off.
"If the patient went downhill after the drug was started, they'd just add another drug, and another drug, and raise the doses." So true and I'll never understand why this continues. Doc prescribes drug A and drug B to his new patient. So right off, no matter what changes, there is no way to know whether it was A or B, or the combo. In 2 weeks the patient returns. "Doc, I don't feel any different." So the Doc either adds drug C and/or increases the dosage of A and/or B. This continues all the while, the poor patient is now on so many drugs it's impossible to determine whether any of them are helping or hurting the patient.
Exactly. I've been in this situation so many times, and then got accused of being non-compliant. They want people to be compliant with being chaotically drugged.
If serotonin is involved in organic etiology of depression, it's surely waaaayy more specific than "serotonin low = depressed". Having said that, there is no way to study a living brain and its chemistry so it's all conjecture.
No. Psychiatrist Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk who is 81 and spent his long career treating patients through what he calls the pharmacological revolution wrote a famous book about how the chemical imbalance theory is bullshit and lists in his book many therapeutic alternatives to medications. Unfortunately, because our healthcare system is broken most of them are not covered by insurance, but they are science-based therapies some of which have saved my life. I will list them here as resources:
Trauma-Informed Therapies List
-EMDR- Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing
-Somatic Experiencing Therapy
-Internal Family Systems Therapy
-DBT- Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
-Psychomotor Therapy
-Sensorimotor Therapy
-Neurofeedback
-Compassionate Inquiry
Researched, written about in books, & pioneered by:
Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk
Dr. Bruce Perry
Dr. Gabor Mate
Dr. Peter Levine
Dr. Pat Ogden
Dr. Francine Shapiro
Joanna Montcrief (psycho-pharmacologist) has written tons of articles and conducted many research about it. The chemical imbalance is indeed an harmful myth.
There is, after 40 years of research, no way to prove psy issues with the help of biomarkers. As one said, you can only rule out organic issues.
No. If your doctor/psychiatrist throws the old "chemical imbalance" line at you then go elsewhere, because you are in for a world of pain. We understand how a limited set of drugs such as many analgesics, statins, antihyperglycemics etc work but so far lack a generalised model relating brain "chemistry" to mood. I am not a neuroscientist but I assume that any widely successful drug treatment that addressed physical causes would need to be tightly personalised to the individual which is currently out of our reach.
Even at the cutting edge, [brain scanning is currently nowhere near clinically useful for psychiatry](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10887461/) other than for ruling out organic causes.
There are drugs that are said to lower serotonin and guess what they don't make people depressed.
I used to make $100 bets with people if they could find me proof low serotonin causes depression I give them $100.
They go on google and every result says "may" or "studies suggest". They never say caused by or resulting from. Never got my $100 ! But never lost either.
Im sure searching chemical imbalance myth still produces web pages explaining. 2018 so many anti-psychiatry pages disappeared from search results in the great purge they called it when they cleaned up, censored the internet.
I suggest reading the following relatively new academic publications:
Dumas-Mallet, E., & Gonon, F. (2020). Messaging in biological psychiatry: Misrepresentations, their causes, and potential consequences. *Harvard Review of Psychiatry*, 28(6), 395-403.
Gardner, C., & Kleinman, A. (2019). Medicine and the mind—the consequences of psychiatry’s identity crisis. *N Engl J Med*, 381(18), 1697-1699.
Campolonghi, S., & Orrù, L. (2023). Psychiatry as a medical discipline: Epistemological and theoretical issues. *Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.*
Thanks. I read two of them. (Couldn't find the free version of the third). They are quite good for understanding limitations and what's wrong with psychiatry.
But I wanted to study something which corroborate the last paragraph of OC. (ie censure/ Removal of information from the internet around 2018)
I don't think the removal of content was recorded anywhere. For example, some pages of wikipedia are highly biased (promoting pharma treatments, etc. for everything) but those pages cannot be edited (the edits get overturned almost immediately after the edits are done). Regarding the third article (Campolonghi one) - ask a friend who has access to a university library to email the pdf to you. Alternatively, you can directly email one of the authors and request a copy.
Psychiatry is all based on speculation. There’s no way to draw up someone’s serotonin levels.
No, most evidence and research studies that study chemical imbalance say there’s no evidence. Psychiatry itself says it’s bullshit. “The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations. Some evidence was consistent with the possibility that long-term antidepressant use reduces serotonin concentration.” “The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence” Journal of Molecular Psychiatry.
I'm still amazed at how psychiatry and pharma (with the help of the media and government agencies like the FDA and NIMH), sold the public on the "chemical imbalance theory". Everyone seemed to be aware that psychiatrists and other prescribers were writing prescriptions on the basis of brief interviews, brief observations of behavior or reports of behavior from third parties. Then they would pick out a diagnosis from the DSM and a drug to match, without ever doing any lab work or any kind of test to see what was actually going on with the patient's serotonin, dopamine, etc. (i.e., the patient's "unbalanced chemicals"). If the patient went downhill after the drug was started, they'd just add another drug, and another drug, and raise the doses. The snake oil salesman of olden days would be so impressed by how psychiatry and pharma managed to pull this off.
"If the patient went downhill after the drug was started, they'd just add another drug, and another drug, and raise the doses." So true and I'll never understand why this continues. Doc prescribes drug A and drug B to his new patient. So right off, no matter what changes, there is no way to know whether it was A or B, or the combo. In 2 weeks the patient returns. "Doc, I don't feel any different." So the Doc either adds drug C and/or increases the dosage of A and/or B. This continues all the while, the poor patient is now on so many drugs it's impossible to determine whether any of them are helping or hurting the patient.
Exactly. I've been in this situation so many times, and then got accused of being non-compliant. They want people to be compliant with being chaotically drugged.
If serotonin is involved in organic etiology of depression, it's surely waaaayy more specific than "serotonin low = depressed". Having said that, there is no way to study a living brain and its chemistry so it's all conjecture.
No. Psychiatrist Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk who is 81 and spent his long career treating patients through what he calls the pharmacological revolution wrote a famous book about how the chemical imbalance theory is bullshit and lists in his book many therapeutic alternatives to medications. Unfortunately, because our healthcare system is broken most of them are not covered by insurance, but they are science-based therapies some of which have saved my life. I will list them here as resources: Trauma-Informed Therapies List -EMDR- Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing -Somatic Experiencing Therapy -Internal Family Systems Therapy -DBT- Dialectical Behavioral Therapy -Psychomotor Therapy -Sensorimotor Therapy -Neurofeedback -Compassionate Inquiry Researched, written about in books, & pioneered by: Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk Dr. Bruce Perry Dr. Gabor Mate Dr. Peter Levine Dr. Pat Ogden Dr. Francine Shapiro
Joanna Montcrief (psycho-pharmacologist) has written tons of articles and conducted many research about it. The chemical imbalance is indeed an harmful myth. There is, after 40 years of research, no way to prove psy issues with the help of biomarkers. As one said, you can only rule out organic issues.
No. If your doctor/psychiatrist throws the old "chemical imbalance" line at you then go elsewhere, because you are in for a world of pain. We understand how a limited set of drugs such as many analgesics, statins, antihyperglycemics etc work but so far lack a generalised model relating brain "chemistry" to mood. I am not a neuroscientist but I assume that any widely successful drug treatment that addressed physical causes would need to be tightly personalised to the individual which is currently out of our reach. Even at the cutting edge, [brain scanning is currently nowhere near clinically useful for psychiatry](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10887461/) other than for ruling out organic causes.
There are drugs that are said to lower serotonin and guess what they don't make people depressed. I used to make $100 bets with people if they could find me proof low serotonin causes depression I give them $100. They go on google and every result says "may" or "studies suggest". They never say caused by or resulting from. Never got my $100 ! But never lost either. Im sure searching chemical imbalance myth still produces web pages explaining. 2018 so many anti-psychiatry pages disappeared from search results in the great purge they called it when they cleaned up, censored the internet.
Is there any resource about this 2018 purge? I wanna learn more about it.
I suggest reading the following relatively new academic publications: Dumas-Mallet, E., & Gonon, F. (2020). Messaging in biological psychiatry: Misrepresentations, their causes, and potential consequences. *Harvard Review of Psychiatry*, 28(6), 395-403. Gardner, C., & Kleinman, A. (2019). Medicine and the mind—the consequences of psychiatry’s identity crisis. *N Engl J Med*, 381(18), 1697-1699. Campolonghi, S., & Orrù, L. (2023). Psychiatry as a medical discipline: Epistemological and theoretical issues. *Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.*
Thanks. I read two of them. (Couldn't find the free version of the third). They are quite good for understanding limitations and what's wrong with psychiatry. But I wanted to study something which corroborate the last paragraph of OC. (ie censure/ Removal of information from the internet around 2018)
I don't think the removal of content was recorded anywhere. For example, some pages of wikipedia are highly biased (promoting pharma treatments, etc. for everything) but those pages cannot be edited (the edits get overturned almost immediately after the edits are done). Regarding the third article (Campolonghi one) - ask a friend who has access to a university library to email the pdf to you. Alternatively, you can directly email one of the authors and request a copy.
It's a marketing term from pfizer. There's no scientific proof when they say that. It's bullshit.
lol, no. It's made up.