Re: SSRIs
andie nachgeborenen wrote:
Not quite sure of your point here, Doug. Depression has a biochemical basis if materialism is true, so you’d expect the brains of depressed people to behave different from those of others.
And while it is true that depression often has situation occasions and standing situation causes, clinical depression is different from ordinary sadness or even grief caused by loss or misfortune. It will often be triggered by causes too minor to produce feelings that dark, or last long after the situational cause has disappeared. That’s on the one hand.
The other hand is that in a great many cases, antidepressants actual work to improve people’s lives. They can be, literally, lifesavers, since depression and suicide (especially manic depression and suicide) are strongly correlated. (A quarter of untreated diagnosed manic deppressives commit suicide. Half attempt it.)
What’s vulgar about biochem explanations of psychological disorders is that they assume that the chemicals are the cause - that once you’ve identified some chemical configuration or process, you’ve hit the bedrock first cause. But what if the chemicals themselves are an effect, a reflection of environmental influences? Or what if the chem configuration interacts with a particular set of environmental influeces to give rise to depression? And I don’t mean just personal history - Carl’s right that capitalism causes depression. And I’ll bet that the anomic, individualistic American kind is more depressogenic than others. If you’re life is fucked, it’s your fault! Just pull up your socks, pick up a self-help book, and get on with it.
Personal history and social structures are also materialist explanations. They’re just more complicated ones.
And yes, the drugs “work” to a certain extent. But as the conclusion of the article pointed out, the relapse rate is higher than with cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Doug