You may have heard that depression is caused by an imbalance of serotonin in your brain, and that's why Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors work as antidepressants: your brain stops sucking it all back up, so it can go around doing neurotransmitter things longer. Well, turns out this hypothesis never really had much in the way of evidence behind it, and a giant meta-study came out earlier this month that pretty much killed it dead. The idea got spread around so much before any real data to support it existed because antidepressants do work better than placebos, it sounds plausible, and people don't like being told that nobody knows why the medicine they're being given works. Now, obviously it's disappointing that so much time, money, and research has gone into chasing down this hypothesis that has ultimately proven to be a dead end, but it also leaves us with a very important conundrum: what are we going to say instead of "make the happy chemical, you lump of fuck"?
