Eli5: why is there no test for the “chemical imbalance” that is often mentioned for depression?
In: Chemistry
I think a major point here is that it’s a lot of guesswork treating depression and other mental issues. This is seriously a huge gray area with a lot of unknowns. Hard to test for something when you aren’t even sure how it works. Some will say mechanism unknown. About all they know sometimes is that it works for some people. Testing on humans is hard.
Depression is as much a software issue as it is a hardware issue. The “chemical imbalance” theory implies it’s just a hardware issue. But it’s more than that.
You can measure concentrations of chemicals in the body. But you can’t measure what someone is thinking with a lab test.
Because they don’t really know how it works, they think they have an idea, but they don’t really know. In fact, they backtrack all the time all over the board on a whole range of issues because every now and then, some realize, they knew wrong, so they can still (know wrong). Just keep that in mind.
There’s a genetic test now which can be taken and conclude which will work best and which you should avoid. Why are doctors still making people be lab rats when the answers are clear?
Emotional baggage, unresolved traumas, when the mind is fed with shit the body starts feeling shit. When you are moving through life unaware of what your thinking feeling and not taking care of it stuff like this happens the power of thought is vastly underestimated
Because there is no such thing. It was a term coined by psychologists in the 80s and 90s to sell the bipolar movement and people bough it.
Neurotransmitter release not only varies in amount, but in timing, as bursts. The mix of these neurotransmitters differs in different parts of the brain and in response to different situations/actions.
So even if you COULD directly measure it, you’d have to do so over time, in various areas, in exposure to various different stimuli/situations.
And even if you could do THAT, it wouldn’t be helpful since epigenetics modifies the expression of genes in response to stress, making every human brain different.
When we think about “chemical imbalance” and depression, those chemicals are mostly neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are made in the brain and they work between neurons which are tiny parts of the brain.
To test the number of neurotransmitters in the brain, we would have to take samples from inside the brain, which would be very difficult and dangerous because the brain is so delicate.
Another problem is that we don’t actually know much about the “chemical imbalance” explanation. It looks like it’s one part of the bigger puzzle, because a lot of people with depression benefit from medicines that affect that balance. Not all though. So even if we could measure how many neurotransmitters someone’s brain is making, using, and breaking up, we wouldn’t know what those numbers meant.
It is a simplification that doctors use to help people understand why drugs can help treat depression. The exact mechanisms behind depression are complex and poorly understood, and likely to vary from person to person. It seems to have something to do with neurotransmitters, and the receptors they bind to, and how they work to regulate each other. But testing for that would require knowing what the baseline is for that particular patient, and getting a sample would require a brain biopsy to examine local neurotrasmitter quantities as well as the density of their respective receptors. And we don’t know from where to take the biopsy and getting enough information may mean we would need to take several. And taking brain biopsies mean you cause local brain damage.
Functional MRI could be a non-invasive tool for determining overall brain metabolism in different functional areas and may eventually lead to more clues about what is wrong in the function of a depressed brain, possibly leading to diagnostic tests and personalized treatment opportunities, but we are a long way from that.
That is my understanding, as a medical doctor.
Because it’s bullshit. You aren’t depressed because of a chemical imbalance. You are depressed because of some trauma in your life, or because you’re leading an unhappy life, possibly because we prioritise the wrong things, because we don’t have enough connection etc. The internet doesn’t make us more connected, it makes us less connected.
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