I’m sad that Christians are going to abuse a new study that’s going around on serotonin levels and depression.
Simply put, the study suggests that serotonin levels have nothing to do with depression.
Simply replied to, that’s nothing new.
Please read this piece at Psychology Today, noting that researchers have been throwing cold water on the “serotonin-depression” connection for awhile now, and that many more compelling medical explanations for depression have been found.
Also, I wrote a bit about this here and note just how narrow a view of SSRI’s the authors take, and how casually (and I believe, harmfully) they suggest there’s no reason to take them.
It’s a study that’s making a splash in the media because it has awfully click-baity potential, but does absolutely nothing to dismiss the increasingly well-supported fact that depression is a medical condition.
As I note on the homepage, it’s already going around in Christian circles, and I’m afraid it will take the church ten steps backward on its understanding of mood disorders as medical conditions.
It’s so terribly sad, because Christians would never say, “Oh, that theory on cancer wasn’t right? Well, that means cancer isn’t a medical condition!”
Of course it’s a medical condition, and no Christian would deny that.
So the fact that this is being abused by Christians is utterly tragic, dangerous, and makes no sense, to boot.
That’s why it’s so important to address, and why I’ll go ahead and link once again to Psychology Today’s quick summary of all the other medical explanations and their much more well-supported studies.
If you struggle with depression…
First off:
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
And if you want to go off your SSRI because of a study that is remarkably narrow (many would call “naïve”) in its take on them, please talk to your doctor first.
