Keeping up with the FITs, 8/4

Bryan vs. Freddie and Virginia on depression; Robert Wright and Jonah Goldberg on polarization and media; writers from Freddie's audience

Bryan Caplan writes,

Nature just published Moncrieff et al.’s major study, “The Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Systematic Umbrella Review of the Evidence,” debunking the theory that depression is caused by serotonin deficiency. Science journalists seem convinced. . .

The question, “Is depression caused by a chemical imbalance?,” in contrast, is a fake empirical question. Why? Because it is a thinly-veiled tautology. Depression is bad, right? We’re all made of chemicals, right? One scientific-sounding synonym for “bad” is “imbalanced,” right? So when psychiatrists say, “Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance,” it’s basically true by definition.

Freddie deBoer writes,

I’ve met plenty of people who were critical of “chemical imbalance” theory of depression who have been thoughtful and compassionate. But I have never met someone who was deeply animated against that theory, who was loud and dismissive and insistent about it, whose views on mental illness were serious and humane. I have never met someone who would leap at every chance to say that depression lies within the agency of the individual who was simultaneously compassionate towards those with depression. A significant majority of them have been outright cranks, anti-psychiatry cultists who were also skeptical of vaccines and GMOs.

…I am again left with the same basic question: why are so many people who do not suffer from mental illnesses or work with them professionally, both left and right-wing, so deeply eager to deny the physiological basis of mental illness and the efficacy of psychiatric medication. It’s one of the few elements of modern society that has true cross-ideological appeal, and the attitude tends to be reflexive and thoughtless and aggressive. And I will never understand why so many people have such an intense desire to decide that mental illness is all mind, no brain, and that the drugs that treat it are necessarily bad. I will never understand it.

He links to Paul Logan, who writes,

what we know about depression, there seems to be something going on in the interaction of adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin- each contributing their own ingredient to the special sauce that is depression. This is a much clearer picture of the supposed “chemical imbalance hypothesis.”

The reason neuropsych nerds get mad whenever anyone purports to refute the “serotonin hypothesis” is because there is no serotonin hypothesis, there’s the hypothesis that serotonin plays a role in a larger complex of disordered neurotransmitters. When you see the words “serotonin hypothesis” is is a giant neon sign shouting “STRAWMAN, STRAWMAN, STRAWMAN.” No one on the research side of things is making an argument for a solely serotonergic cause of depression, nor are they arguing that serotonin pathways are the only ones in need of balancing.

Virginia Postrel writes,

If you want to read some expert reactions, here’s a collection of short responses to the new findings. A couple of examples, from the same institution, University College London, as the review’s co-authors:

Dr Michael Bloomfield, Consultant Psychiatrist and UKRI Principal Clinical Research Fellow, Translational Psychiatry Research Group Head, UCL, said:

“The hypothesis that depression was caused by a chemical imbalance in serotonin was a really important step forward in the middle of the 20th century. Since then, there is a huge of amount of research which tells us that the brain’s serotonin systems plays very important roles in how our brains process different emotions.

“The findings from this umbrella review are really unsurprising. Depression has lots of different symptoms and I don’t think I’ve met any serious scientists or psychiatrists who think that all causes of depression are caused by a simple chemical imbalance in serotonin.

I am afraid that Bryan comes across as strawmanning. His main claim is that psychiatrists were throwing around the phrase “chemical imbalance” without any enough specific content to make in a falsifiable hypothesis. But it seems that at the very least they are naming specific chemicals.

I am willing to bet Bryan that over the next three years, the most credible, high-quality research on depression helps to justify and support pharmacological treatment for it. In theory, we could agree on an expert or panel of experts to judge the outcome.

In a dialog with Robert Wright, Jonah Goldberg says,

virtually every mass communication innovation, going back to the printing press, yielded sort of populist upheavals. You know, you don't get the Protestant Reformation without the printing press. And, contrary to some propaganda, there was a lot of nasty populist upheaval that came with the Protestant Reformation—and the Counter-Reformation. And the populous protests of the 1930s were driven largely by radio. And the violence and clashes that we saw in the 1960s were driven in no small part by television. And I think that, now, the rise of social media, and the instantaneity of it, puts all of that on steroids.

…I have a long list of villains in this. I think primaries are terrible. I think part of the problem is Congress doesn't do its job. And so Congress is supposed to be the place where politics happens but, instead, politics is spilling out all over the place because it's not happening in Congress. I think [also] the balkanization of the media—we've gotten to a place where too many outlets think their job is to tell their audiences what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. And in an era of negative polarization, as long as you hate the other party enough, that's a qualification. And, um, it's a hot mess.

Freddie deBoer invites his readers to provide links to their own writing. Among those is Chris Boutté, who writes,

When I tell people that I’m a college dropout who only attended one semester at a junior college, they instantly get an idea of aspects of my personality as well as how intelligent I am.

I like to say that the future belongs to autodidacts, and Chris is clearly one of those. My idea for a network-based university is still out there for somebody to steal.

Another link went to Education Realist, who wrote,

Every state in the country  has produced articles or research discussing the racial imbalance of parent preference, that non-white parents were reluctant to return to inperson instruction and whites were eager and angry at any delays. 

She hopes to debunk the common view that teachers’ unions were the main driver of school closures. Nor were progressive parents. It seems that non-white parents wanted learning to be remote, and school districts gave them what they wanted—good and hard, as it were.