How We Talk About Depression Affects Our Ability to Heal

From Psychology Today/Justin Garson, PhD: “Our careless use of metaphors can actually make people worse off.

Depression has long been framed as a ‘chemical imbalance’—a matter of too much or too little of various chemicals in the brain. Drugs like Prozac were long thought to improve people’s lives by restoring these chemicals to their ‘correct’ proportions.

Although the simplistic serotonin hypothesis of depression—the idea that depression stems from too little serotonin—has since fallen into clinical disfavor, chemical imbalance as a metaphor is alive and well, and it may be more harmful than we realize.”

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