The FINANCIAL — Depression is not likely caused by a chemical imbalance, and calls into question what antidepressants do. Most antidepressants are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which were originally said to work by correcting abnormally low serotonin levels, according to the new umbrella review — an overview of existing meta-analyses and systematic reviews — published in Molecular Psychiatry.
There is no other accepted pharmacological mechanism by which antidepressants affect the symptoms of depression.
The popularity of the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of depression has coincided with a huge increase in the use of antidepressants. Prescriptions for antidepressants have risen dramatically since the 1990s, with one in six adults in England and 2% of teenagers now being prescribed an antidepressant in a given year.
Many people take antidepressants because they have been led to believe their depression has a biochemical cause, but this new research suggests this belief is not grounded in evidence, researchers say.
Research that compared levels of serotonin and its breakdown products in the blood or brain fluids did not find a difference between people diagnosed with depression and healthy control (comparison) participants.
Research on serotonin receptors and the serotonin transporter, the protein targeted by most antidepressants, found weak and inconsistent evidence suggestive of higher levels of serotonin activity in people with depression. However, the researchers say the findings are likely explained by the use of antidepressants among people diagnosed with depression, since such effects were not reliably ruled out.
Very large studies involving tens of thousands of patients looked at gene variation, including the gene for the serotonin transporter. They found no difference in these genes between people with depression and healthy controls. These studies also looked at the effects of stressful life events and found that these exerted a strong effect on people’s risk of becoming depressed — the more stressful life events a person had experienced, the more likely they were to be depressed. A famous early study found a relationship between stressful events, the type of serotonin transporter gene a person had and the chance of depression. But larger, more comprehensive studies suggest this was a false finding.
The researchers say their findings are important as studies show that as many as 85-90% of the public believes that depression is caused by low serotonin or a chemical imbalance. A growing number of scientists and professional bodies are recognising the chemical imbalance framing as an over-simplification. There is also evidence that believing that low mood is caused by a chemical imbalance leads people to have a pessimistic outlook on the likelihood of recovery, and the possibility of managing moods without medical help. The authors also found evidence from a large meta-analysis that people who used antidepressants had lower levels of serotonin in their blood. They concluded that some evidence was consistent with the possibility that long-term antidepressant use reduces serotonin concentrations.
The researchers say this may imply that the increase in serotonin that some antidepressants produce in the short term could lead to compensatory changes in the brain that produce the opposite effect in the long term.
While the study did not review the efficacy of antidepressants, the authors encourage further research and advice into treatments that might focus instead on managing stressful or traumatic events in people’s lives, such as with psychotherapy, alongside other practices such as exercise or mindfulness, or addressing underlying contributors such as poverty, stress and loneliness.
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