Something I need to share with you all

This I something I found out today from an American physician.

The idea that depression results from a chemical imbalance in the brain theory has been around for more than 50 years. This is based on a theory that depression results from a deficiency of serotonin a chemical substance that nerves use to send signals to each other. There is no convincing evidence that depression results from any kind if of chemical imbalance in fact the psychological and biological causes of depression are still completely unknown. There is probably a genetic contribution depression as well as anxiety just as there is a genetic contribution to how athletic we are. Some people are probably born to be more outgoing or painfully shy but we simply don't know how strong the genetic contributions might be or how this works. Infact we still don't know to what degree depression and anxiety result from hardware problems in the brain such as abnormality with brain tissue structure or metabolism vs software problems involving learning and neural circuitry. Drug company's encourage doctors to tell patients that depression results from a chemical imbalance in the brain in order to sell antidepressants. So if a doctor tells you that you have a chemical imbalance it seems logical to conclude that you need drugs to correct this imbalance but this is more of a matter of marketing science and to me is ethically questionable to tell a patient he or she has a chemical imbalance in the brain. I am a physician and been trained not to tell patients things that cannot be validated with lab test for chemical imbalance in the brain, there is no convincing basic research that has confirmed this theory either. I began my psychiatric career doing full time brain research at the university of Pennsylvania school of medicine I focused on the chemical imbalance theory and won awards for my research unit in the Philadelphia va hostpital, we gave depressed veterans massive daily doses of L tryptophan an essential amino acid that the brain uses to manufacture serotonin. The massive increase in serotonin levels had no effect whatsoever on the depression levels in our patients. My colleagues and I published this finding in the top psychiatric journal but it went largely unnoticed until recent years and is now being quoted quite a lot.

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