I'm no expert, this is just speculation.
When it comes to trying to understand the biological basis of depression, I think there's a tendency to assume there must be one neurotransmitter or other bit of body chemistry involved. The idea that serotonin might be key has underpinned most of the drugs available, and those drugs interrupt what the brain does. There's a lot of speculation in this intervention and increasingly the evidence is that it isn't working for a lot of people.
Human bodies are complicated and we have a lot of hormones and neurotransmitters floating about inside us. Chemicals that make us feel good include serotonin, endorphins, dopamine and oxytocin. If our bodies aren't producing those chemicals effectively, we're going to feel it. Increasingly the science suggests that depressed people aren't simply people with wonky chemistry, but are people who have suffered. Trauma, long term stress, illness, pain, disability, and the pressures of poverty are all likely to cause depression. What's going on seems to be a complex body response to unbearable circumstances - if not for everyone then for a significant percentage of people who suffer with mental health problems.
Part of the problem with how we treat depression is this habit of looking at it as some kind of individual failing, to be solved by fixing the individual. I think we need to look far more closely at the systems and structures that make people ill in the first place. Economic stressors and environmental stressors could be tackled, and these would be obvious places to start. Social cohesion and tackling loneliness are also obvious things to consider.
Rather than trying to 'cure' depression I'm increasingly convinced we need to come at it the other way. We need to support wellness. We need to have a better understanding of what things actually help us to be well and happy, and what we can do to manage those feel-good chemicals in our own bodies. The role of diet, sleep, movement, social interaction as contributors to better mental health are things we already know about, or at least science has things to tell us. The degree to which an average person grasps the links between lifestyle and mood is another question. The amount of power a person has to change their lifestyle in a way that will promote their mental health, is another question again.
Alongside all of this, we should be looking at what pollution does to us - air pollution, light pollution, noise pollution. We should be looking at the chemicals in our food and in our soil, and we should also be looking at what's missing. We spend a lot of time and effort killing bacteria, but the human body is a cooperative and we actually depend on friendly bacteria to help us.
There are also existential questions to ask. Most of us crave meaning and significance. Modern life can be lonely, isolating and alienating. We derive much of our meaning and purpose from social interaction and being valuable to others, and the more we strip that out, the more harm we do ourselves.
Whatever depression is at a biological level, it isn't simple and there aren't going to be simple solutions. We need to be looking at the causes that underpin depression as a whole, not treating it as an individual problem.
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