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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When everything feels flat
Reserpine emptied out the monoamines and people became depressed. Iproniazid and imipramine raised them and mood lifted. Out of that came the account of depression as trouble across serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine, and almost every antidepressant on the market is still organised around it. Useful scaffolding, and not a finished explanation, which is worth saying plainly to anyone who has been told their brain is simply short of something.
Ibrahim describes God as the one 'who cures me when I am ill' (Quran 26:80). Illness is spoken of as an ordinary part of a life, and the cure is not owned by any one explanation of it.
الشعراء
وَإِذَا مَرِضۡتُ فَهُوَ يَشۡفِينِ
He who cures me when I am ill
Qur’an 26:80read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Pooling 115 studies, cognitive behavioural therapy clearly outperformed control conditions for adult depression, though its advantage over other genuine psychotherapies was small. That disproves no biological account, and talking treatments have their own effects on a body. What it does show is that the same condition shifts through more than one route, which is a reason to hold any single cause story loosely.
Cuijpers P, Berking M, Andersson G, Quigley L, Kleiboer A, Dobson KS. (2013). A meta-analysis of cognitive-behavioural therapy for adult depression, alone and in comparison with other treatments.. Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
An account built out of what a treatment does can only ever describe part of what the illness is.
Sometimes the honest answer is that there is nothing in your surroundings to feel good about. Changing them counts as treatment, not as running away.
When someone says they react badly to normal doses of almost everything, take it as information about their body rather than as a personality trait.
If you are the therapist, hand the prescriber the profile and leave them the pick. What you hold that they do not is what this person is like across a week, and what they will absolutely not tolerate.