Antidepressant use among teen girls and young women has skyrocketed (2024)

Between 2016 and 2022 the absolute percentage went from about 4% to almost 7% of american teenage girls who take an antidepressant.

Not trying to be a conspiracy theorist here but we don't always get it right. The opioid crisis in the US was started by "getting medication through doctors." Research changes over time and current research does suggest that antidepressants are often over-perscribed.

What it is actually saying is that there was a meta study done that found low serotonin itself was not necessarily the cause of depression. However drugs that target serotonin still work as anti-depressants.

It's really a terrible article. Never mind using "chemical imbalance" and "low serotonin" interchangeably throughout the article.

What’s disturbing and awful is the field of psychiatry has been so completely taken over by it - psychiatrists tend not to do much other than dispense pills and have patients fill out forms, like they are in a drug trial. They play whack a mole with peoples nervous systems and prescribe very wide acting meds.

Psychiatrists used to be interested in the whole mental health of people rather than stats and what drugs they’re on. They might actually talk about trauma, suggest other therapies.

There’s a big body of evidence that the trauma model has a lot of truth to it, as opposed to the “illness” model which presupposes a chemical cause, treating medication like some sort of split that you rarely ever take off. The trauma model has problems but its much more close to the underlying root causes.