Ongoing series about depression

I've written in the past a few postings with suggestions about how to better cope with depression. I want to now start to talk about the causes, because it is only by fully understanding the causes that people can truly alleviate and even successfully cure depression.

First of all I need to attack the slogan that has become popular, which is that depression is caused by "chemical imbalances in the brain." Um, my quarrel with this statement is that chemical imbalances are not the "cause" of depression. Chemical balances result from depression and become the "highways" by which depression and its symptoms are felt.

Let me use one of my many analogies. Suppose you come across a car accident scene where two cars have smashed together and one person is killed. You ask a bystander, "How did this happen?" The bystander turns to you and says "Metal was crushed, killing that victim."

Huh? The crushing of metal "caused" the accident? Didn't you expect to hear something more like, "Well, this car turned in this direction, but the other car was going that way and I'm not sure what happened but I think they were both going too fast to get out of each other's way?" And then when two cars collide, metal gets crushed, of course, and people are potentially harmed by the crushed metal. But the crushed metal did NOT "cause" the accident itself.

Likewise the "chemical imbalances" that have been hypothesized and sometimes demonstrated in patients (and sometimes not) are the "crushed metal," not the why and where-for of the accident. So as a society people need to understand that humans always look for the easy answer, especially in medicine, rather than determining the root cause of a problem.

Stating that "chemical imbalances cause depression" is like saying "weak metallurgy causes traffic accident deaths." Rather than driving more carefully, or fixing a dangerous intersection (and we all know examples in our own towns of very dangerous streets or intersections... there is one in my area where a school entrance on a busy route has many accidents within even a period of weeks), what if people said, "Since the cause of traffic injury and deaths is weak metals in cars, let's just continue to drive carelessly or ignore safety hazards and just make the metal on our cars stronger?" We can pay more and more for cars that increasingly have thicker metal armor on them, and then find that we still have accidents and maybe there are more deaths because the passengers are now crushed in an accident by the heavy almost tank like walls.

This is what happens when people buy into the slogan that "chemical imbalances cause depression." Rather than finding the true causes of depression, people experiment (sometimes monkeying with self medicating, or put their trust in doctors who are wild guessing anyway at the behest of pharmas) with the chemicals that are imbalanced. Yet the root cause of depression continues to cause the chemical imbalances, and they also react to the drugs being given to "adjust" (in theory) the imbalances.

Now I am not telling anyone to stop taking depression medication just because I am pointing this out, because it is a fact that depression medication saves lives. However, just like the theoretical heavier metal coating on the accident example cars, it does not address the dangerous intersection problem. Worse, it might aggravate it.

The vast majority of depression is caused by the over stimulation of the brains of human beings in ways that outstrip where human beings have evolved to in capacity and for healthful balance. Babies in the womb are already overstimulated, and this continues from the moment they emerge in birth through every day of their lives.

Don't jump to conclusions about what I'm saying because in truth this is a mighty complicated pickle that humans have gotten themselves into and I need to post more about the layers of this problem. But I wanted to start with a first step of this analogy so that you can prepare yourselves for looking at this problem (and hopefully solving it for yourselves and for society overall) in a whole different light. We need to go after and change the root causes of depression, as it is a painful and soul draining condition and especially our youth are carrying a dreadful burden. It is going to get worse if medication is always the same "answer." Medication should be viewed as better seat belts and maybe big rubber bumpers on our example crash cars that are temporary measures until the dangerous intersection itself is fixed.

I hope you find this useful.