Please Stop Saying "Chemical Imbalance"
Hey Team, Today, I’ll be diving into the controversy surrounding the chemical imbalance theory. After recently starting the book “This Is Your Brain on Food” 1 by Uma Naidoo, MD, a 2020 book by a psychiatrist and hearing her state “Serotonin, a key chemical deficient in the brains of depressed and anxious people…” within the first 20 pages, I have been pushed to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore. Here is a deep dive on the lie we (mostly) all believe. For decades, the public has been told that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain, often attributed to a serotonin deficiency or, more broadly, to imbalances in monoamine neurotransmitters. 2 This theory gained traction in the 1960s when researchers observed that imipramine, an early antidepressant initially developed as an antipsychotic, alleviated depressive symptoms. Scientists later discovered that imipramine inhibited the reuptake of norepinephrine and, to a lesser extent, serotonin. This led to ...