Article about "Song of the Cell" book by S. Mukherjee

I thought I'd post this (rather long) article from The Guardian, about a new book by Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee. It discusses depression and the search for a new paradigm to describe and understand it.

It interested me because in a sense, it would be helpful to do something similar with brain fog. If this were studied, seriously and as a distinct symptom, we might even learn something fundamental about ME itself.

https://www.theguardian.com/society...erjee-on-the-search-for-a-cure-for-depression

 

Over time it became painfully obvious to me that depression is far less well-defined than ME ever was, in part on account of us being lobbed into it, along with many, many other issues. And now basically depression is used a short-hand for illness, so basically everyone who is ill is now labeled as depressed, thanks to the BPS ideology that wants to do just that.

It's extremely hard to solve a problem without defining it correctly. It's even harder when instead of defining it, everyone seems to accept the most possibly vague, generic, hand-wavy explanation that consists of: factors from the major dimensions of life influencing each other complexly, or whatever.

And while the definition of ME has gotten more refined over time, recently very rapidly thanks to Long Covid, despite the worst efforts of many, the definition of depression has gotten even more vague and generic, especially now that the BS about a chemical imbalance is harder to get away with. Despite all the important people saying that it wasn't actually said, it definitely was said by many physicians to many patients. The chemical imbalance was the BS used to justify people who said they had absolutely none of those so-called psychosocial issues, were happy at the time and had no reason to feel this way.

It's actually weird that this newish definition is almost never voiced, unlike the chemical imbalance, because it had a veneer of scientific credibility. But it's pretty clear that what makes up depression diagnoses is an even more heterogeneous grab bag than ME ever was, and that's despite the whole "chronic fatigue" sabotage. Decades of mislabeling guaranteed that.

The whole issue here is with false certainty. So many confidently wrong claims that are then held as gospel truth, they paint the entire profession in a corner, unable to admit having BSed about something this big, so the tradition of BS continues. That search could go on a long time as long as it's so poorly defined and most accept the complete absence of actual standards, as an impediment on the traditional hand-waving.