Depression NOT Linked to Serotonin Imbalance!?
“The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.”
Depression: A Serotonin Deficiency?
For decades people have been led to believe that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain due to a deficiency of serotonin. In July 2022, the journal Molecular Psychiatry published the first exhaustive review of the main research on links between depression and serotonin, which found no evidence of a connection between reduced serotonin levels or activity and depression.
Professor Joanna Moncrieff, who led the research, says “it is always difficult to prove a negative, but I think we can safely say that after a vast amount of research conducted over several decades, there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities, particularly by lower levels or reduced activity of serotonin.”
Depression: An Imbalance in Chemicals?
The popularity of the chemical imbalance idea of depression has coincided with a huge increase in the use of antidepressants. Prescriptions have sky-rocketed since the 1990s, going from being rare to a situation now where one in six adults in England are prescribed an antidepressant in a given year.
Prof Moncrieff added: “Epidemic proportions of the UK population are using antidepressants at the moment. Thousands of people suffer from their side effects, including the severe withdrawal effects that can occur when people try to stop them, yet prescription rates continue to rise. This situation has been driven by the promotion of the false belief that depression is due to a chemical imbalance.”
Original Article: Moncrieff, J., et al. The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Mol Psychiatry (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0
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