Researcher Uncovers What May be the Real Cause of Depression

Anna Hunt, Staff Writer
Waking Times

Depression as a mental illness is actually quite controversial. The psychiatric profession has agreed to attribute it on a chemical imbalance in the brain, although many question if this is the real cause of depression.

That is exactly what Johann Hari set out to investigate. His new book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions, shares his quest as he explores the question: What really causes depression and anxiety, and how can we really solve them?

Clearly, Hari discovered enough interesting information about the real cause of depression to fill a whole book. What I wanted to highlight in this article is Hari’s perspective on the medical establishment’s choice to categorize depression as a chemical imbalance.

The Grief Exemption

The term major depressive disorder was introduced by a group of US clinicians in the mid-1970s. It established the diagnostic criteria for depression based on patterns of nine possible symptoms.

In 1980, depression was incorporated into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). In this book, American psychiatrists include all the symptoms of different mental illnesses, so they could identify and treat these diseases in the same way.

After some time, psychiatrists started to questions if people who are bereaved also need pharmacological treatment. Hari writes:

If you lose someone, it turns out that these symptoms will come to you automatically. So, the doctors wanted to know, are we supposed to start drugging all the bereaved people in America?

This is when the grief exemption was created. The DSM authors updated the manual to exclude people who have lost somebody in the preceding year from the depression diagnosis, even if they showed depression symptoms.

Hari states:

The grief exception seemed to have blasted a hole in the claim that the causes of depression are sealed away in your skull.

The grief exception created too much debate in mainstream psychiatry. Doctors started asking if depressive symptoms where a logical and understandable response to other life circumstances, not just a death of a loved one. Eventually, DSM authors eventually did away with the exemption. Doctors were once again told to say that depression is, in fact, caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, associate professor at Arizona State University, is a leading expert on the grief exception. In his book, Hari reveals Cacciatore’s perspective:

She told me this debate reveals a key problem with how we talk about depression, anxiety and other forms of suffering: we don’t, she said, “consider context”. We act like human distress can be assessed solely on a checklist that can be separated out from our lives, and labelled as brain diseases. If we started to take people’s actual lives into account when we treat depression and anxiety, Joanne explained, it would require “an entire system overhaul”. She told me that when “you have a person with extreme human distress, [we need to] stop treating the symptoms. The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.”

Are We Treating the Problem or the Symptoms?

Most typical mainstream doctors address symptoms associated with depression with anti-depressant drugs, such as Prozac. Cacciatore raises a very valid concern, that we may be treating the symptoms, but that a potential untreated problem is the actual cause of depression.

As a patient taking anti-depressants for many years, Hari asked:

“Why were so many other people across the western world feeling like me? Around one in five US adults are taking at least one drug for a psychiatric problem. In Britain, antidepressant prescriptions have doubled in a decade, to the point where now one in 11 of us drug ourselves to deal with these feelings. What has been causing depression and its twin, anxiety, to spiral in this way? I began to ask myself: could it really be that in our separate heads, all of us had brain chemistries that were spontaneously malfunctioning at the same time?”

To examine this question, Hari took at 40,000 mile journey around the world. Here are some of the findings he uncovered during his investigation.

They [drug companies] would fund huge numbers of studies, throw away all the ones that suggested the drugs had very limited effects, and then only release the ones that showed success. To give one example: in one trial, the drug was given to 245 patients, but the drug company published the results for only 27 of them. Those 27 patients happened to be the ones the drug seemed to work for.

Professor Andrew Scull of Princeton, writing in the Lancet, explained that attributing depression to spontaneously low serotonin is “deeply misleading and unscientific”.

Dr David Healy told me: “There was never any basis for it, ever. It was just marketing copy.”

Finding out the story fed to depressed patients may be no more than a marketing pitch, Hari researched further. He sought out to uncover the true cause of depression. He collected evidence that led him to believe that there are seven specific factors in the way we are living today that are causing depression to rise. In addition, two real biological factors (such as your genes) can combine with these forces to make things worse.

Here’s Hari’s thoughts:

It turns out that, in the same way, all humans have certain basic psychological needs. We need to feel we belong. We need to feel valued. We need to feel we’re good at something. We need to feel we have a secure future. And there is growing evidence that our culture isn’t meeting those psychological needs for many – perhaps most – people.

…the depression of many of my friends, even those in fancy jobs – who spend most of their waking hours feeling controlled and unappreciated – started to look not like a problem with their brains, but a problem with their environments.