Out Goes the Chemical Imbalance Theory

[Dooey]

This article is from Dorothy Rowe....thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!
This will have positive repercussions worldwide. Already the Australian Website of one Depression Awareness organisation, Beyond Blue has removed any reference to a 'chemical imbalance' being the cause of depression!

Farewell to Chemical Imbalance (Jan/Feb 2007)

Openmind January/February 2007

Farewell to Chemical Imbalance

How often have you heard that a chemical imbalance is the cause of depression? A hundred times? If you’re as old as me you’ve heard it a thousand times, and said by psychiatrists in tones of absolute certainty. It’s why the SSRI drugs were made specifically to put serotonin in the brain and thus right the imbalance.

However, without telling the rest of us, psychiatrists have changed their minds. A few weeks ago I was browsing the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ website. The pamphlet on bipolar disorder had been removed and I wanted to see if a new one was in place. It was, and some curious changes had been made. I then looked at their pamphlet on depression. It’s a very long pamphlet, written in a chatty way. Under the heading, ‘Why does it [depression] happen?’ is a statement which says that sometimes there’s an obvious reason for becoming depressed and sometimes there isn’t. It’s different for different people. Then there’s a list of the things that can lead you to be depressed. These are: things that happen in our lives; circumstances; physical illness; personality (‘This may be because of our genes, because of experiences in our early life, or both.’); alcohol; gender (‘Women seem to get depressed more than men do. It may be that men are less likely to admit their feelings and bottle them up, or express them in aggression or through drinking heavily. Women are likely to have the double stress of having to work and look after children.’); and genes (depression can run in families). And that’s it. No chemical imbalance.

There’s never been any evidence for a chemical imbalance in the brain when a person is depressed. That idea was abandoned by scientists thirty years ago. However, a lack of scientific evidence has never stopped some psychiatrists from claiming black was white. It took the Royal College many years to accept that the minor tranquillisers are addictive; that the monoamine oxidise inhibitors are addictive; and, more recently, that the SSRI drugs can provoke suicidal and hostile thoughts. But it does seem, at last, that the Royal College has accepted that depression has far more to do with how we see ourselves and how we deal with our lives than it does with the physical make-up of our bodies.

Even the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital has moved in that direction. They’re holding a conference in April 2007 called, ‘Depression: Brain Causes – Body Consequences’. On their website the preamble about the conference states,

Depression cannot be described any longer as a simple disorder of the brain, but rather as a series of behavioural and biological changes that span mind, brain, genes, body – and indeed affects both psychological and physical health. . . The experts will present neurobiological, psychological, genetic and evolutionary models, with particular emphasis on the mechanisms linking the brain to the endocrine and the immune systems, and therefore linking depression to physical health.

So everything about us is involved in getting depressed. Not a simple explanation in sight.

What about manic depression, or, as we have to call it now, bipolar disorder? What’s happened to the gene that’s supposed to cause this? The Royal College’s new pamphlet on this disorder says:

We don't have a complete answer to this, but:

*
research suggests that it runs in families - it seems to have more to do with genes than with upbringing. there seems to be a physical problem with the brain systems which control our moods - this is why the symptoms of bipolar disorder can often be controlled with medication
*
* episodes of illness can sometimes be brought on by stressful experiences or physical illness.

What do they mean by ‘brain systems’? No neuroscientist talks about brain systems. Do you ever get the feeling that some psychiatrists think that the public is so stupid they can be fobbed off with any nonsense?

Ever since the late nineteenth century when the German psychiatrist Kraepelin described depression as a mental illness psychiatrists have been trying to find a physical cause for this illness. Vast amounts of time and money have been spent on this fruitless enterprise. If only Kraepelin and his colleagues had seen their patients, not as specimens to be studied, but as fellow human beings who could describe and discuss what was happening to them. If this had happened we would have come to understand a great deal more about being depressed than we do today. In those intervening years we might have seen how it is our ideas that create pain, suffering, conflicts, poverty, cruelty, intolerance, selfishness, hatred, envy and stupidity, and that these ideas damage us. But they are just ideas, and we are free to change them. If only Kraepelin and his colleagues had understood that.

http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/ http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/apps/depres...roduction.aspx

[Delynbetter]

Oh, thank you for this.

[summer bee]

great article, dooey! do you have a link to the original website that it was published on? i want to mention it in my blog.

[Dooey]

Sorry, I should have included that already.
Here it is:

http://www.dorothyrowe.com.au/index...._Feb_2007).htm

[rdjanis]

Great article!!

[mouse]

Dorothy Rowe is excellent...
Her books are inspiring...
As for "out goes the chemical imbalance theory..."
It was never in...
It was just Pharma propaganda...
Glad to see its now known for the bull****e that it was...

[fiddaman]

Neither GlaxoSmithKline or the MHRA can give answers as to what constitutes a proper chemical imbalance of serotonin in the brain - weird because Seroxat is prescribed for this 'disorder'

The only thing that I can see is that Seroxat actually causes the chemical imbalance rather than rectifies it - A genius piece of marketing by GSK.

Prescribe a drug

Let the patient get hooked on the drug

Play down the risks by producing clinical trial studies beneficial to GSK

Employ ghost writers and patient support groups to back up the benefits of taking Seroxat

Robustly deny Seroxat causes aggression, suicidal tendancies etc

Always settle out of court for any litigation

Infiltrate the Medicines Regulatory Agency with former employees of GSK
Fund the government

Financially secure to research and market more SSRi type drugs

Credit where it is due, the marketing team at GlaxoSmithKline are without doubt highly skilled at manipulating doctors and the general public.

They don't even klnow how Seroxat works - they are just pleased that it does work. Cases where it hasn't worked - infact quite the reverse, seem to go unoticed - until the invention of the internet that is.

The MHRA are proud of the Yellow Card system - Why?

It is a completely flawed system and they only act on less than half of the Yellow Card reports.

A more robust system would be for the MHRA to employ a person or persons with a basic grasp of internet seaching. Then, they will see the REAL suffering from the REAL people.

Alas, they have ties to GlaxoSmithKline, namely Alistair Breckenridge and Ian Hudson. If they see GlaxoSmithKline have duped the public then they themselves have been duped by messrs Breckenridge and Hudson and that would cast a serious dark shadow on the MHRA's integerity.

They (The MHRA) have been investigating GlaxoSmithKline for nigh on four years now - my guess is they are waiting for a 'busy news day' until they release their findings. This way the story will be pushed to some small article in the tabloids.

It is utterly shameful of any human being to cause human suffering. Both GlaxoSmithKline and The MHRA have continued to deny Seroxat is harmful in the adult population - forget the clever spin 'dangerous in young adults'.

GlaxoSmithKline are currently being sued through the courts both here in the UK and in the United States. It now needs a firm of solicitors with huge balls to sue the MHRA. There is enough evidence I'm sure to successfully bring them to trial.

It will happen

[Buxy`s Back]

great work Fiddy,couldnt of seen it better put,and yep lets see if any solicitors have the balls to go for the MHRA ,now that would be just rewards,but hey is it really gonna happen? mm who knows

[mouse]

I would be interested also If Panorama would consider doing a new documentary on the Seroxat Babies Born with Defects....
Surely this should be mainstream news and there should be a government Health campaign in every newspaper and On every TV channel about this...
How can they let another thalidomide happen?...
Is the might of GSK and their money worth it for the innocent lives of these babies???...

[darcyb]

Fantastic stuff! I'm so glad this was discovered.

It's about 7 years later than our first announcement,"duh, it's not a chemical imbalance", but we like repetition eh?

They’re holding a conference in April 2007 called, ‘Depression: Brain Causes – Body Consequences’. On their website the preamble about the conference states,

And hopefully the next conference will be Depression: Body Causes - Brain Consequences (ie:crap diet, poor sleep, work stress, alarm clocks, and other abuse we put our bodies through)

[silence4now]

Originally Posted by Dooey

*research suggests that it runs in families - it seems to have more to do with genes than with upbringing. there seems to be a physical problem with the brain systems which control our moods - this is why the symptoms of bipolar disorder can often be controlled with medicationhttp://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/

Duh! Couldn't most of us have told them that? Based on my own family history though, I believe some of it is our family environment and behavior that is modeled for us, and the rest of it is just our own struggle to find our true self.

I would expect to see more future debate about this in the psychiatric community before it's widely accepted. But this article is very encouraging.

[greg8474]

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