antidepressants can help people fix root causes. take them for 6 months to 2 years or so, break out of a bad cycle, get some space without depression symptoms to build up healthy habits and restore a social life.

there are some bad profit motives to keep people on SSRIs indefinitely. however at least they don't compete with other aspects of your life. and now that they are dirt cheap (at cheapest, $4 for a month supply at Walmart) the profit motives are much less than before.

hard to imagine an "AI girlfriend" that could be similarly short-term and bring positive changes. it's just dystopian. the most profitable way to run such a product is not to help, it's to eat up as much user time as possible and outcompete healthy activities and real human relationships.

I think it's helpful to look at depression as a group of diseases like cancer. There are some cases of depression where we know the root cause: thyroid issues, sleep apnea-related depression, low testosterone related depression, brain tumors, etc. In those cases, addressing the root cause is probably the best treatment method. This is similar in some ways to cancer, where certain cancers have very definite causes and can be treated by dealing directly with those causes (like cervical cancer).

Then there are all the other cases, some of which likely have simple causes that are just unknown, some of which have complex causes that are intermeshed deeply with the biology of human thinking. In that case, you have blunt tools, like anti-depressants, to address the pathway of the disease without knowing the exact cause, much like chemo-therapy can be used to attack cancer cells without knowing what prompted the cancer originally.

So in short, yes treat the causes, but when you don't know the cause it's not irrational to treat the symptoms as best you can

> “Fix the causes”

How, exactly? Yes, some people experience depression as a symptom of something than can be addressed through various therapies, but what about people who just have it wired into their brains? How do we “fix” that?

I agree, 100%. Here we are indeed. But that doesn't mean we should not try and change things. One step at a time, right?

Saying that something exists is not an argument about why something _should_ not exist.

But I agree, "should" discussions are rarely the most productive. Shoulda, woulda, coulda, I guess :)