I had an interesting experience the other day. After reading CP&P's excellent post on the role of serontonin in depression and the long essay he linked to, I decided to raise them -- the essay, the post, and the issue -- in discussion in a virtual community I belong to. It's fascinating to me how adamantly intelligent people will defend their sacred cows. And the whole chemical imbalance theory of depression has become one.
I asked my husband, who is not a mental health professional, if all he knew about depression is what he sees in the drug ads, what would he think was the cause? And of course, he said he would believe it was a purely biological illness. And that just about anything less than happy fell under it.
I found in the community where I posted that what I posted triggered something of a defensive response as if I had said that SSRIs are of no value. Or that there is no biological dimension to depression. There seemed to be something close to hostility to the notion that depression could be treated with non-medical approaches, this despite articles which have appeared in the popular press about the efficacy of exercise and therapy vs medication alone.
Many of the folks I know who take SSRIs believe they must take them for the rest of their lives, as a diabetic takes insulin. Very few of them have been in other than relatively short term therapy and even fewer were originally prescribed their SSRI by a psychiatrist nor have they ever seen one.
It is impressive to me how deeply effective the advertising for these drugs has been and continues to be. One has to wonder if the battle is indeed lost.