Depression Delusion Volume One Quotes

“Indeed, the chemical imbalance story encourages us to think of ourselves as governed by the chemicals in our brains, with this chemical control seemingly disconnected from the many life events, that, at least according to past understandings of human nature, could be understood to dramatically alter one’s moods. We are mechanistic machines, and if our mood molecules are out of balance, with this imbalance presented to us as a “disease,” then it makes perfect sense to think that a solution must lie in a pill that fixes that imbalance. But is the claim true? Did scientific investigations find that this is indeed so? Every society would do itself a favor if it publicly sought to answer that question. In this book, Terry Lynch has done just that. And in so doing, he has told, step by step, how psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry constructed and sold a false story to the public. By the end of this book, readers will be asking a new question: How could this falsehood have endured for so long? As Terry Lynch writes, there was never good scientific reason to believe that antidepressants fixed a chemical imbalance in the brain. The hypothesis that this might be so arose from an understanding of how an antidepressant acted on the brain. Once researchers discovered that an antidepressant increased the activity of serotonin in the brain, they hypothesized that perhaps people suffering from depression had too little serotonin. However, researchers then investigated whether this was so, and discovered that it was not. Even by the early 1980s, researchers were saying that it didn’t appear that a deficit in serotonin activity was a cause of depression.”
― Terry Lynch, Depression Delusion Volume One: The Myth of the Brain Chemical Imbalance

“Have you heard or been told that chemical imbalances occur in depression? If so, you have been seriously misinformed.”
― Terry Lynch, Depression Delusion Volume One: The Myth of the Brain Chemical Imbalance