Originally posted by: Riprorin
There is 10 times more major depression in people born after 1945 than in those born before. This clearly shows that the root cause of most depression is not a chemical imbalance.
Wait a second. I just read through your handy leaflet about depression and I want to know where you got it from. Secondly, I am exactly what that article describes: a clinically depressed teenager (19). Is all depression a chemical inbalance? clearly no. Traumatic events such as separation of family, death in the family, etc all can contribute to temporary depresion. What you do not understand, however, is that some people get depressed for absolutely no reason. My life can be going great, I can have a girlfriend, be doing extremely well at school, have a lot of friends who I spend time with, etc and, in one moment, I can just feel sh$tty about the whole thing. None of it matters. All my successes just fall away in my own eyes, and I feel incredibly depressed.
If you were right, and depression is only caused by "social rejection, family turmoil, or failing exams" explain which of those factors has contributed to me being depressed. Certainly I have suffered a lot from an abusive father and a nasty divorce, and those can be contributing factors in my depressed feelings sometimes, but it isn't always. I don't hang on those things in my life, but I still sometimes get horribly depressed.
Finally, if depression isn't chemical, then why do drugs that cause chemical changes in the brain work? Placebos? I think not. The studies that were done on drugs like Effexor, Zoloft, and Prozac all show they have much much much much higher rates of success than the placebos that they were tested against.
My point is, you don't know anyhting about being depressed and you are just regurgitating information from another source. Certainly not all the cases of depression are chemical, but some of them clearly are.
One of the reasons for the increased numbers of people diagnoised with depression is that it has finally become something that IS a problem. IN the 1940s you didn't talk about being depressed, you just lived with it. Now people have realized that there is a problem. I have a feeling that a lot of the increase over the last 50 years has more to do with people understanding that they shouldn't go through a lot of their lives feeling like crap and trying to do something about it.
It's the same thing as "battle fatigue" - it wasn't recognized as a serious problem until the 1960s, but thousands of soldiers, who were often just called 'pansies' or 'pussies' and shoved back into combat, suffered from it during the First and Second World Wars.
