[4] As I have said before, I am not rigidly against the use of antidepressants per se.
Some of my depressed patients did indeed respond positively to treatments other than psychotherapy, often in ways that might be seen as miraculous. My disappointment and concern is that there remains no clear protocol that confirms what kind of depression will respond to which treatments. The result was that I used my own criteria when considering options for my patients, based primarily on my clinical experience.
I used psycho-pharmaceuticals in the past. I can attest to the fact that they do help some very severely depressed patients just as I can also attest to the fact that they do not help others. To this day, for me at least, there are no studies that satisfactorily define what kinds of depression respond to which chemical interventions.
It can be an assault on the patient to give them a small manufactured pill. How is that possible? Keeping a patient on antidepressants for years while ignoring psychological factors such as early childhood trauma, or recurrent ongoing trauma as the cause of the depression, is a chemical assault. Such an approach has the quality of trying to beat down the depression rather than cure its cause. Until we have an actual proven answer in identifying which depression would be responsive to which drug, we need to be extremely careful in using these approaches.
[5] The term “Chemical Imbalance” has no real meaning.
It is a false assumption that antidepressants are generally both safe and effective. The truth is that all pharmaceuticals are substances foreign to our bodies, even when they are based on natural chemicals produced by plants for example. Pharmaceuticals are highly potent chemicals. They are specially designed to quickly alter our metabolism and interfere with it. In fact, psycho-active medications are designed to rapidly impact one’s existing brain chemistry. They are far more potent than the plants they may be derived from.
The term “Chemical Imbalance” is somewhat a sales device. The identification of the numerous serotonin-receptors in the brain has helped some, but so far has had not cured the pain and suffering of all or even most depressed patients. The truth is that psychiatry in the 21st century remains an inexact science.
After almost a century of sophisticated biochemistry research, we are still generally operating in a fog as to defining exactly what is the chemical imbalance in a brain that expresses pathological depression. I do not dispute that psychiatric medications have contributed to the treatment of certain psychoses. They have, in fact, led to a reduction of the number of institutionalized psychotic patients in developed countries. However, we must accept that there are some unavoidable limitations in the purely pharmaceutical approach to depression. It is a the false hope that we can trade pills for genuine psychotherapy in the name of saving time and man-power.
