Good point. For many people, myself included, SSRI's don't do jack shit. I understand that they help a lot of people. It just sucks that they're always the first line of treatment that professionals I've seen go to (and in my childishness I stop seeing them and get no treatment whatsoever).
One possible interpretation here is that "depression" is a cluster term that describes symptoms rather than pathologies. Something similar is true of (among other things) psychosis, which is a symptomatic cluster that can have a broad spectrum of proximal causes.
Philosophy of mind isn't my specialty, but I know enough about it to have a strong suspicion that in another few decades, we're going to view diagnoses like "depression" similarly to how we view 19th century diagnoses of "hysteria" now: clusters of symptoms that were complex, multifarious, and socially influenced in both etiology and appropriate treatment.
Good point. For many people, myself included, SSRI's don't do jack shit. I understand that they help a lot of people. It just sucks that they're always the first line of treatment that professionals I've seen go to (and in my childishness I stop seeing them and get no treatment whatsoever).
One possible interpretation here is that "depression" is a cluster term that describes symptoms rather than pathologies. Something similar is true of (among other things) psychosis, which is a symptomatic cluster that can have a broad spectrum of proximal causes.
Philosophy of mind isn't my specialty, but I know enough about it to have a strong suspicion that in another few decades, we're going to view diagnoses like "depression" similarly to how we view 19th century diagnoses of "hysteria" now: clusters of symptoms that were complex, multifarious, and socially influenced in both etiology and appropriate treatment.