Instead, figure out why depression has increased so dramatically in the last ~century and address that.
Office productivity is directly corrolated to the coffe machine. The moment that breaks down everything stops. Coincidence, or are we all addicted to a drug?
Don’t read things into my comments that aren’t there.
Yet you don't like the idea of "drugs" actually making people's live better?
The current world... Capitalism and political systems, is just an emergent result of society's internal stress, it is pendulum between, trying to making it and giving up to depression...what if we can actually balance that with a slight change to our diet of, vitamins, food supplements, neuro stimulants ( coffe, sugar)... Maybe we just need to sprinkle som psylocibin on top?
has it? Were our current guidelines to diagnose depressive episodes with around a century ago?
an anecdote but i think yes. pre-internet you wouldn't know what's happening outside of your community. Now, internet (IG, tiktok, fb, TechCrunch) surfaces the best of the world before your eyes.. it's a constant reminder there exist better people in whatever area you value (could be a skill, appearance, material things)
> Were our current guidelines to diagnose depressive episodes with around a century ago?
Certainly not, but researchers are very capable of looking at historical records and detect evidence to treated or untreated conditions.
Furthermore, people have been describing their own emotions and other people's behaviors since recorded history.
There's an army of psychologists, anthropologist, sociologists and geneticists out there studying the history of mental illness. Among many, prof. Sapolsky comes to mind.
I don’t want to live in a world where the cure to depression caused by forced lockdowns is to take psychedelics. That seems very dystopian.
It isn't necessarily dystopian. It may still be a valid and genuine treatment, though I agree it would be better to understand more thoroughly why it works, not just that it works.
A former medical professional once told me "The answers you want for how this OTC drug works at the cellular level don't exist. That isn't actually what drug studies cover."
I don't disagree with your aims. I simply disagree with some of your implicit assumptions.
That seems obvious to me. Animals don’t like being in cages.
I'm not depressed. I'm a brunette for the first time in a decade or more. I live without a car and the sun typically keeps my hair bleached out to a shade of blonde.
But I have a serious medical condition and already did remote work and germ control is my life.
I had a longstanding issue resolve about six months. For the first time in decades, I'm mostly not suicidal anymore.
To whatever degree depression is biological in origin, drugs may be a reasonable treatment.
Granted, curing sick building syndrome and other root causes may be better in the long run. But it can take ages to confidently identify such things, educate people, find solutions, etc.
In the mean time, a new drug option for a biologically based ailment may do wonders for people in the here and now.
I routinely treat somatopsychic issues with diet and exercise. I also routinely get dismissed by internet strangers as a nutter.
So I'm confident that the answer you want both exists and will take an excessively long time to distribute to a meaningful portion of the human population.