Low Serotonin does not Cause Depression

Psychology Today reports:

For the last half-century, the dominant explanation for depression has centered on serotonin. The basic idea: low levels of brain serotonin or serotonin activity leads to symptoms of depression. This theory, which is known as the “serotonin hypothesis,” is based on several data points, including animal research and the effects of antidepressants that are supposed to work by increasing brain serotonin levels. But, in the last several decades, a number of researchers have challenged the idea that serotonin plays a principal or even major role in depression.

In recent days, the serotonin hypothesis of depression has been explicitly challenged by a number of scientific publications. Most notable (at the time of this writing), a paper published in Nature Molecular Psychiatry reviewed several lines of evidence on the subject of the serotonin-depression connection and concluded that “the main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.”

Millions of people are taking drugs because they have been told that the drugs are correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain. That has never been proved.