For years specialists have been battling what they regard as a pernicious fable about despair: that it’s attributable to a chemical imbalance within the mind.
The idea, which originated within the Nineteen Sixties, held that low ranges of serotonin prompted despair. For many years psychiatrists believed that antidepressants labored by elevating serotonin ranges within the mind. The arrival of Prozac, one in every of a brand new wave of medicine often called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), meant that from the Nineties onwards an increasing number of individuals medicated their despair.
This week researchers at College School London, who analysed a long time of analysis, concluded there was no convincing proof that despair is related to, or attributable to, decrease serotonin concentrations.
The research hardly shocked James Davies, a tutorial who has