Depression Isn't An Imbalance

Read It Before You Run Your Mouth, Karen.

INITIATING_TRANSMISSION
AUTHOR: Profit
ORIGIN: Queensbridge
CURRENT_LOCATION: Tijuana, Baja California, MX, Earth-473B
STATUS: Operational
CLASSIFICATION: SYSTEMS_AUDIT // MOOD_AS_MALFUNCTION // THE_CHEMICAL_LIE
 

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Is sadness a message or a manufacturing defect?

When’s the last time you let a bad feeling talk before you diagnosed it?

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//FIRST_THINGS_FIRST

I grew up hearing about it the same way everyone else did. Depression is a chemical imbalance. Said with the same confidence as gravity, or the sky being blue. No one ever mentioned it was only a hypothesis or theory. Instead, they said it like it came down the mountain on a stone tablet.

The statement came from a pharmaceutical ad campaign in the 90s that needed depression to sound more like diabetes. Something broken in the machinery that a pill fixes the way insulin fixes a diabetic. Easy to sell. Easy to swallow, literally. it worked so well that the sentence outlived the science that was supposed to hold it up.

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//THE_MECHANISM

Let me explain how this trick works.

You feel something heavy. Grief, numbness, you can’t get out of bed, whatever. Someone whispers in your ear: it’s not you, it’s your brain chemistry. God hates you. It sounds like relief. It carries the blame while giving you something to shake your finger at.

Once the feeling gets reclassified as a malfunction, the investigation closes. You stop asking what it’s pointing at. Or what changed in your life, your environment, your relationships, your sleep, your purpose, your direction. The feeling stops being information, It becomes a glitch. You don’t investigate a glitch. You medicate it or you wait for a technician to show up.

A message, signal, whatever the hell you want to call it, tells you to move.

A malfunction tells you to sit still and wait for a fix.

Two completely different instructions and the one you choose to accept determines everything that comes after it. Most people never even get to choose. They just absorb the default because mommy told them early enough that it became their own conclusion.

Abracadabra. You can’t, or won’t audit a belief you think you generated yourself.

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//THE_RESEARCH

In 2022 some science people and dudes with microscopes led by some human named Joanna Moncrieff ran an umbrella review. They studied every major body of research on serotonin and depression, gathered together and examined as a whole. Published in Molecular Psychiatry. The conclusion: there is no consistent evidence that depression is caused by, or even reliably associated with, lowered serotonin activity.

Decades of “research” and now the supposed foundation gone.

The audit gets its own audit though. A group of scientificators retaliated. Saying the review misread some of the underlying studies and oversimplified the pharmacology. They are still going at it, science everywhere though the science hasn’t settled.

Which is basically the fuckin point.

The public was given a gift wrapped in certainty. While the researchers never had any certainty to begin with. What got mass distributed as established fact was a marketing position wearing a lab coat. The real science was much messier, always contested, and much more honest than the shit that made it into the commercials.

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//THE_DISTINCTION

Before some Subsmacks dumbshit with syndrome of the downs tries to talk shit, I’m not telling you to throw away your little pills .

A real condition and one being oversold as pure biology are two separate claims. Merging them is the same horseshit thinking that I’m auditing.

Biology plays a part. Genetics load the gun. Environment pulls the trigger. What is inaccurate is the story that got sold to us, where your mood is a defective component and there’s nothing surrounding the chemistry worth examining. Where the investigation ends at the symptom because the symptom has been labeled as the origin.

Medication as a tool, alongside looking honestly at your life, is leverage.

Medication as a verdict, a permanent label that closes the case before it’s open, is a cage with some PR and a brand name on it.

One treats you like a person with a problem worth understanding. The other treats you like a machine with a faulty part. This is important when you’re sitting there for the first time trying to explain why you can’t get out of bed.

You deserve to be asked what happened before what’s wrong with you. Instead, you get a checklist, a diagnosis code, and a prescription filled before they’ve finished explaining. The checklist isn’t entirely wrong. But the order sure as fuck is.

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//THE_PRICE (ON_SALE)

Have you ever considered what gets lost when a feeling or emotion thing gets labeled a malfunction.

The information inside of it.

Anger tells you a boundary was crossed. Grief tells you something mattered. Numbness is quiet. It doesn’t announce itself the way the other two do. It slides in slowly, usually after you’ve been overriding signals for long enough that your system stopped sending them. You don’t feel sad. You don’t feel much. You move through the day doing the shit required and nothing seems to happen the way it used to and you can’t explain why. It isn’t easy when there’s nothing dramatic to point at. Only the absence that replaces it.

Such absence is information. It’s the signal at the end of a long list of ignored notifications telling you something has been wrong for longer than you’ve admitted.

The moment culture teaches you to treat your inner weather like a broken appliance instead of a signal, you lose the most accurate diagnostic tool you own. The feelings don’t stop coming. You just stop reading them. You learn to wait for an external verdict instead of trusting what the internal one is already telling you.

A generation raised to distrust its own emotional signal as just chemicals loses the very instrument it needs to navigate life. That ain’t a side effect. It;s the el priceo, that’s Mexico for price. And it costs way more than anything on a pharmacy receipt.

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//THE_AUDIT

When a foreign feeling pops up, I ask myself one question.

Is this a message/signal/notification or a defect.

The majority side with defect because that’s what they were told when they were young enough to mistake it as their own idea. They never tried to audit it. They just drank the Zuko and built a relationship with a premise that was never proven.

Run the audit. Where did the feeling come from. What changed. What is it asking you to look at, fix, leave, or grieve. Sometimes the answer really is biological and a doctor is the right route to take. I don’t really believe that, but you’re welcome to, human. Sometimes the answer is your job, your relationship, your mom, your girlfriend being a hoe, fuck, I dunno, the shit you haven’t said out loud to anyone yet. A pill can’t remedy something that was never a chemistry problem to begin with.

SYSTEM_LOG: MOOD_AS_MALFUNCTION_AUDIT
SUBJECT: Chemical imbalance narrative and loss of emotional agency
ORIGIN: 1990s pharmaceutical marketing
MECHANISM: Feeling reclassified as glitch
THE_ABRACADABRA: Can't audit a belief you think you generated yourself
THE_DISTINCTION: Oversold certainty is the crime not the treatment 
THE_COST: Your Mom
THE_AUDIT: Message or defect // Ask before you medicate 
STATUS: Operational

//END OF TRANSMISSION

Profit….