The other, more acceptable view of depression is biomedical. Depression, say the biological psychiatrists, is an illness of the body. It comes from an inherited biochemical defect—sited, perhaps, on an arm of chromosome number 11—that produces an imbalance of brain chemicals. Biological psychiatrists treat depression with drugs or electroconvulsive therapy (“shock treatment”). These are quick, inexpensive, and moderately effective remedies. The biomedical view, unlike the psychoanalytic, is partly right.
