You have inadvertently outed yourself as not having a clue by your reply. It’s nothing personal but you just clearly don’t have a clue and/or don’t have skin in the game.
It’s fine. I don’t know anything about professional juggling because I have zero skin in that game.
Paging Dr. Brochacho: fMRI and brain networks have been around for a while!
Your articles also say that:
- depression medication does appear to be effective in some cases regardless, indicating some other neurochemical mechanism at work.
- the existence of a "neurochemical imbalance myth" underpinning psychology as a whole is, itself, a myth.
- the idea that this mythical myth about neurochemical imbalance has been debunked, is also a myth.
- that the psychological scientific consensus has, since the first peer-reviewed mention of the word "neurochemical" in the 60s, quite consistently been aligned with the 1978 synthesis statement by the then president of the APA:
> "Psychiatric disorders result from the complex interaction of physical, psycho-logical, and social factors and treatment may be directed toward any or all three of these areas."
Your second article is particularly clear in explaining all this.
Exact quote from second article
"Furthermore, the SSRIs were accorded a rock-star status as effective antidepressants that they did not deserve. Most troubling from the standpoint of misleading the general public, pharmaceutical companies heavily promoted the “chemical imbalance” trope in their direct-to-consumer advertising."
There second article admits the overuse of the term while trying to defend psychiatry for never officially adopting it, but everyone who's been on them knows that's exactly what they were told about their effectiveness, so whether the trope originated with the pharmaceutical companies (my assertion) or not, they were still way over prescribed and there's no statistically significant evidence they actually work when controlling for confounders, as the first meta analysis clearly demonstrates.