Depression is NOT caused by low serotonin levels and most drugs used to treat it are based on a myth, leading psychiatrist claims

As Reported in the Daily Mail

• David Healy is head of psychiatry at the Hergest psychiatry unit in Bangor
• Claims the idea low levels of serotonin causes depression is a fallacy
• Marketing of SSRI drugs like Prozac has been 'based on a myth', he claims
• Experts refute his claims saying 'SSRIs work in the real world of the clinic'

The belief that the most popular antidepressant drugs raise serotonin levels in the brain is nothing more than a myth, a leading professor of psychiatry has claimed.

David Healy, head of psychiatry at the Hergest psychiatric unit in Bangor, North Wales, said the misconception that low levels of serotonin were responsible for depression had become established fact.

He suggested that the success of so-called SSRI drugs – which include Prozac and Seroxat – was based on the ‘marketing of a myth’.

The emergence of these serotonin reuptake inhibiting (SSRI) drugs in the late 1980s came after concerns about tranquilliser use to treat depression.

Even though they were weaker than old-style tricyclic antidepressants, they took off because of the idea that SSRIs restored serotonin levels to normal, ‘a notion that later transmuted into the idea that they remedied a chemical imbalance’.

In an editorial in the BMJ, Professor Healy said that in the 1990s, no one knew if SSRIs raised or lowered serotonin levels but there was no evidence that treatment corrected anything.

[...]

The full BMJ editorial "Serotonin and Depression" is available in PDF format here

Much of the article was taken up by people trying to refute the attack on their paychecks.