This is three pages in so I haven't seen if someone addressed this yet.
When you come across articles about scientific research, I recommend people go and seek out the research yourself instead of letting news stories relay the information. Because they oversimplify it for clicks and it's often incorrect or not fully explained.
My understanding of this was they found that depression isn't only based on seratonin which scientists already knew despite depression medications being SSRI with the second S standing for seratonin. The reason they suspected it had nothing to do with seratonin, based on my understanding, is because antidepressants tended to show effectiveness after a few weeks of usage instead of immediately. So it shows that there are some downstream processes being impacted by the drugs that have an effect on mood instead of just SERATONIN. The drugs work, they just aren't sure how which is surprisingly common among a lot of drugs. They found out they work by accident. Viagra is a famous example of this (they were trying to find a way to help people with heart problems and instead found out it also gives you a boner).
TL;DR serotonin isn't the driver of depression, it's something else but antidepressants haven't been proven to be a fraud by this as there is other evidence outside of this showing their effectiveness. I saw many news stories taking this info and then extrapolating this means they found antidepressants don't work. That isn't what happened which is why always seek out the actual studies or find a forum/article from a more science minded journal that can parse the information better than your average non scientific journalist.
When you come across articles about scientific research, I recommend people go and seek out the research yourself instead of letting news stories relay the information. Because they oversimplify it for clicks and it's often incorrect or not fully explained.
My understanding of this was they found that depression isn't only based on seratonin which scientists already knew despite depression medications being SSRI with the second S standing for seratonin. The reason they suspected it had nothing to do with seratonin, based on my understanding, is because antidepressants tended to show effectiveness after a few weeks of usage instead of immediately. So it shows that there are some downstream processes being impacted by the drugs that have an effect on mood instead of just SERATONIN. The drugs work, they just aren't sure how which is surprisingly common among a lot of drugs. They found out they work by accident. Viagra is a famous example of this (they were trying to find a way to help people with heart problems and instead found out it also gives you a boner).
TL;DR serotonin isn't the driver of depression, it's something else but antidepressants haven't been proven to be a fraud by this as there is other evidence outside of this showing their effectiveness. I saw many news stories taking this info and then extrapolating this means they found antidepressants don't work. That isn't what happened which is why always seek out the actual studies or find a forum/article from a more science minded journal that can parse the information better than your average non scientific journalist.
