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_refugee_  ·  3635 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is depression a kind of allergic reaction?

Warning: This post is definitely snarky, and also I lost my "serious" tone at one point and went way back deep into sarcasm because, well, just cuz.

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This just in!

Add more medicine to your medicine and we can help you fix anything!

P.S. More breaking news - your mind is connected to your body! Some scientists say they even interrelate!

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We don't know shit about what causes depression. We don't know if it's serotonin imbalance for instance, we just do know for sure that if we give you SSRIs, you'll feel better. And, well, serotonin being the feel-good-happy chemical that it is, it shouldn't be a shock that throwing more at a person will make them feel better.

I would like to point out that good diet, exercise, and maybe some meditation apparently all help lower/manage inflammation as well...but they're barely mentioned in this article. Funny story - exercise really helps with depression, too. I'm not a doctor, but I think I read somewhere that meditation can be really good for, like, your brain. Those little white fibers in it or something. And vegetables?!?! I think the correct term for those is "superfoods" these days, right? Oh, wait - you're right. Organic superfoods. They have to come from plastic bags so you know they're clean and also where they're from. Without a label how would I know you got the right kind of Morningstar broccoli? Farms, CSAs, gardens, and anything with dirt on it - that "food" is for squares. And hippies.

Wait - uh - are you telling me - are you telling me that if I get outside, and move around a little more, and maybe don't kill your body with sitting - warning, shit health posts galore ahead, I'll just - uh - feel better? That's crazy. That's impossible. That sounds cheap, and it sounds like work.

Don't you know paying for a rainbow of magic pills to fix all your symptoms is better? It's efficient. It's really like magic. One pill, and my headache's gone. Another pill, and I'm wide awake. Too awake? Here's a pill that'll make you sleep. Here's a pill to lift your mood. Here's a pill to cut your anxiety. Here's a diet pill. It's like liquid exercise, except in capsules! And literally, no sweat!

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Look, guys. Science is great, medicine is great. They've found that eating habits may be influenced by gut bacteria, which is fascinating. Maybe anorexics and bulimics have substantially different gut flora. There's this crazy idea we can fix them by making them eat poop pills or giving them fecal transplants or whatever, so that healthy, well-adjusted, non-societally-damaged gut bacteria can move on in to these sick bodies like neighborhoods and fix 'em up. Change the brain by changing stuff in your gut.

Maybe we really can fix people's brains by giving them medicine that sticks into the right part of the body and changes the chemistry that eventually ties back to the brain and gets it all back into whack.

But I really don't think we should do away with talk therapy, and I'm not a fan of popping pills to fix imbalances that can be easily managed with healthy lifestyle decisions. (I'm talking more inflammation here than depression - although exercise can absolutely help depression, I'm not deluded enough to think it's always a viable option or successful, especially with extreme cases.)