🔴 WATCH THE FULL EPISODE: https://ept.ms/4k7AINXShow more In the early 1990s, a pharma campaign dramatically rewired how the public understood depression. Here’s how it happened—and why it worked, according to psychiatrist Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, author of “Chemically Imbalanced.” Show less
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The Serotonin Myth Debunked
00:02:22
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| The serotonin myth is the idea that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain. | |
| It's an idea that was first put out there in the 1960s, then picked up by the pharmaceutical industry in the 1990s, widely propagated by them as part of their campaign to sell SSRIs, their new generation of antidepressants. | |
| And it was always and still is officially a theory, a theory about the possible origins of depression. | |
| But it was promoted so strongly and often in very categorical terms that people have come to believe that it is an established scientific fact that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain. | |
| And me and a set of colleagues set out to look at the evidence for whether this is the case or not a few years ago. | |
| And we published what's called an umbrella review, a sort of meta-review of all the different areas of research that have looked at this in 2022. | |
| And we showed that there is no consistent or convincing evidence in any of these areas of research for any association between serotonin and depression. | |
| So hence, the idea is a myth. | |
| It's kind of shocking to hear that. | |
| I mean, most of us assume that this is just true, basically that there's some sort of imbalance, some sort of problem in the brain that these drugs actually fix. | |
| But you're saying that that's not the case. | |
| That's not the case. | |
| So we showed that the evidence on serotonin and depression doesn't stack up. | |
| There are numerous other theories about possible biological mechanisms that might underpin depression. | |
| They have not been proven either. | |
| And in fact, for most of those, there's very much less research than there is on the links between serotonin and depression. | |
| But you're right to say that there is an assumption, both within much of the medical profession and I think in the general public now because of the promotion of this idea that depression must be caused by some underlying biological mechanism and maybe we just haven't found it yet. | |
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Deliberately Shaped Minds
00:02:36
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| But actually we didn't always used to think like that. | |
| We've had our minds deliberately changed, deliberately shaped on this issue. | |
| So when the pharmaceutical industry started these promotional campaigns in the early 1990s, they were associated with disease awareness campaigns that were run by medical organisations, often with funding from pharmaceutical companies. | |
| And I looked at the archives of one of these campaigns when I was writing the book. | |
| This was the Defeat Depression campaign that was conducted in the United Kingdom. | |
| And the aims of that campaign were to persuade people that depression is a medical condition and that you should go to your doctor and get antidepressant treatment to treat it. | |
| They did some market research before they launched the campaign and they asked people what do you think depression is caused by and one of the options they gave to people is it's caused by a chemical imbalance or some sort of biological abnormality in the brain. | |
| The vast majority of people didn't think that depression was caused by those things. | |
| They thought depression was caused by unemployment, divorce, having been abused as a child, adverse life events, in other words. | |
| And they also thought that treating depression with a drug would just numb someone's emotions and wasn't a sensible idea and might lead to people becoming dependent on the drug. | |
| So this is how most people thought back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. | |
| And the pharmaceutical industry set out very deliberately, I believe, to change people's minds and to persuade people instead that depression is a biological condition and needs a biological remedy, i.e. the drugs that they were promoting. | |
| So this is just a conspiracy to sell drugs? | |
| This was a marketing campaign. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It was aided and abetted by the medical profession, who had, as I mentioned, who had first come up with this idea, actually back in the 1960s, and parts of the psychiatric profession were very keen to believe that the conditions they were treating were biological diseases, the same as other doctors were dealing with, and very keen to believe that they had sophisticated, | |
| targeted treatments with which to treat these conditions. | |