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Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

No no no no. The diagnosis of depression absolutely does not revolve around "changes in body chemistry and the functioning of the brain", except insofar as "functioning of the brain" equals the symptoms reported by the patient! There are no known physical or chemical tests for depression. Even if we have some vague theories about "chemical imbalance in the brain", for the most part the neurological or biochemical mechanisms of depression are a mystery.

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What irks me about this is every human experience is reflected in "changes in body chemistry and the functioning of the brain". But that's about as useful as saying that a car breaks down due to mechanical changes. It's not wrong, but it's pretty useless.

It's a false explanation, like explaining how a sleeping pill works by saying that it contains a sleep-causing agent.

> There are no known physical or chemical tests for depression.

The absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence.

It is true that so far, we don't have physical or chemical tests for depression. This doesn't prove that the chemistry or the brains or neurotransmitters are functioning the same way in depressed and non-depressed people, it just says the science still can't tell.

Yes, but for now what we call "depression" is those patient-reported symptoms – it cannot be any other way because at the neurochem level there may not even be any single thing that could be called "depression"! The term may not be useful except for denoting a certain syndrome, ie. a set of symptoms. Just like there's no single thing that causes the upper respiratory syndrome that we call "common cold".

Which is entirely irrelevant. The relevant part is that depression is diagnosed based on reported symptoms, not physically detected. The fact that it is not physically detected is not evidence that it can't possibly be physically detected, just a statement that it isn't.

My issue with TLA is that it states that "There is no depression Gremlin". I disagree: I think that there may be depression Gremlin, we're just unable to reliably discover it yet.

The point isn’t that depression has no biological cause. The point is that there are probably numerous biological causes. To strain the analogy, there are probably dozens of different depression gremlins. Maybe even a depression goblin, and a depression troll.

Saying that you have “depression” doesn’t give you an understanding of what’s causing it.

We have a baby with colic. What does that mean? It means the baby cries 3 hours per day for 3 days a week for at least 3 weeks with no other explanation. That’s it. It’s not something you can point to and say oh that explains it. That’s the cause. It literally just means there is no explanation.

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