There has been extensive research on the serotonin system since the 1990s, but it has not been collected systematically before. Also, antidepressants appear to have a generalized emotion-numbing effect which may influence people's moods, although we do not know how this effect is produced or much about it. In fact, drug trials show that antidepressants are barely distinguishable from a placebo (dummy pill) when it comes to treating depression. There are other explanations for antidepressants' effects. SSRIs temporarily increase the availability of serotonin in the brain, but this does not necessarily imply that depression is caused by the opposite of this effect. Until now, however, there has been no comprehensive review of the research on serotonin and depression that could enable firm conclusions either way.Īt first sight, the fact that SSRI-type antidepressants act on the serotonin system appears to support the serotonin theory of depression. In the period of this marketing push, antidepressant use climbed dramatically, and they are now prescribed to one in six of the adult population in England, for example.įor a long time, certain academics, including some leading psychiatrists, have suggested that there is no satisfactory evidence to support the idea that depression is a result of abnormally low or inactive serotonin. And many started taking antidepressants because they believed they had something wrong with their brain that required an antidepressant to put right.
The idea was also endorsed by official institutions such as the American Psychiatric Association, which still tells the public that "differences in certain chemicals in the brain may contribute to symptoms of depression."Ĭountless doctors have repeated the message all over the world, in their private surgeries and in the media. Although first proposed in the 1960s, the serotonin theory of depression started to be widely promoted by the pharmaceutical industry in the 1990s in association with its efforts to market a new range of antidepressants, known as selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs.
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