http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/
The serotonin theory is as close as any theory in the history of science to having been proved wrong. Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future.
However, the overdiagnosis problem means that what we call ‘mild depression’ might just be the regular human blues and resolve itself.
Treating a hormonal imbalance by putting the hormones directly in is generally considered the last-shot. If a man has chronically low testosterone, then diet, mineral supplements and exercise are advised, not steroids. If a woman has ovarian cysts, at least a part of the treatment is lifestyle, before administering hormone-altering drugs. Why should is be any different with depression? Yeah, my serotonin, dopamine, GABA, adrenaline and possibly thyroid hormone production is messed up. But trying to treat each and every one of them with a drug, when they’re in a state of flux to begin with, will make me feel worse and make my body less able to produce the hormones on its own.
The stomach produces most serotonin in the body. My money’s on diet.
Monitoring sugar, yeast, lactose, vitamin D and B vitamin levels helps with all sorts of depression. It won’t make you not-depressed. But it will make you able to function in civilized society. In other words, “melancholy”, as the Victorians put it. They’re sad and idle and despondent, but they get their jobs done.
It’s only really today, when we are adequately cared for by daddy government, that we believe the greatest harm of mental illness is our “feels” and not the very real inability to function that can accompany it.
They eat mountains of Oreos and confuse the sugar high and sugar crash with bipolar. I have met people who literally do that.
Weird. Though, again, as someone with actual mood swings, I can see how to a more stable person the energy spike of eating sugar might resemble mania. In reality, it’s a bit more inverted: sugar, yeast and, in lactose-intolerant people, lactose can cause depression pretty much as soon as it hits the small intestine. Manic episodes can be calmed with caffeine and vitamin D. It’s like everything is in reverse.
Yes the body shuts down the expected result and this addresses the prior issue.