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The 5 Biotypes of Depression
Depression is a major health crisis in America and getting worse by the day thanks to COVID-19. For many people living with depression, drugs that are supposed to help them get better often come with unpleasant side effects and can even make their symptoms worse.
Make no mistake about it: depression is big business. The sicker people there are, and the longer they stay sick, the more money drug makers make. This is good news for the pharmaceutical industry, but bad news for people struggling with mental health.
Antidepressants don’t cure depression because they’re not designed to cure it, just treat the symptoms. In the 1970s, researchers really started to look at chemical imbalances in the brain and ways to improve brain function. This led to the treatment options you see advertised on TV today: drugs like Lexapro, Paxil, and Zoloft. These drugs treat the symptoms of depression — like low levels of serotonin or dopamine — but ignore the root causes behind why those levels are off in the first place.
Imagine the brain as a garden whose plants are sickly and fail to flourish. The way we treat depression is like spraying on a bunch of fertilizer without first checking the quality of the soil. But as everybody knows, nothing grows well in poor soil.
