* I'm not at Splendour in the Grass. Never seen the appeal at being at a massive outdoor music festival where you stand a good chance of either sunburn or being in a mudbath. Each to their own, I guess.
* Someone on Twitter posted about this dress this morning, and it is very stylish, and very old. (Apparently, the string was mostly gone, so it is a restoration of how it is believed to have originally looked.) But were there any undergarments at all?:
* Lots of publicity being given to the claim that in fact, low levels of serotonin in the brain are not shown to be the cause of depression. While I haven't read much about it yet, I would have thought that proper blind trials would have been done to show that selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors are of benefit for some people, and if can rule out a placebo effect, they must be doing something? Is this happy news? No, not really. But it's interesting, at least.
Lots of publicity being given to the claim that in fact, low levels of serotonin in the brain are not shown to be the cause of depression. While I haven't read much about it yet, I would have thought that proper blind trials would have been done to show that selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors are of benefit for some people, and if can rule out a placebo effect, they must be doing something? Is this happy news? No, not really. But it's interesting, at least.
ReplyDeleteSteve a lot of the hype around serotonin was driven by Big Pharma marketing that was all too readily accepted by the medical profession. It isn't very well known that antidepressants can target a number of neurotransmitters and that there were many in the mental health community who did not buy into that chemical imbalance nonsense. The biomedical model is too constrictive. Yes, there is a biological component to depression but there isn't some impenetrable wall between us and the world. Depression is best perceived as occurring at the interface of the individual and environment. The first trials on antidepressants were disgracefully rigged. They are now so desperate for new treatments that they are using ketamine, psilocybin, and LSD. The early trials are very promising but early trials often are. Moreover it is only one treatment every few months for the latter two. Ketamine though, I know what that does(blocks a vital receptor) and must be used daily. It is a very stupid approach because it can potentially induce cerebral atrophy.
We are bespoke creatures, especially in the relation to the brain, so people will respond differently and can benefit from the various therapies. Nonetheless the over confidence adopted towards frequentist statistics and the biomedical model of depression, are examples of clinicians being very lax in their critical analyses of these treatments.