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Health

What can we learn from a debunked theory of depression?

Rebutting the serotonin theory of depression exposed an important gap in our knowledge. But Joanna Moncrieff's new book Chemically Imbalanced takes too narrow a view of how we should react

By David Robson

16 January 2025

Top view of pills grouped in plastic container

We urgently need new ways to understand and treat depression

FotografiaBasica/Getty Images

Chemically Imbalanced
Joanna Moncrieff (Flint Books)

Joanna Moncrieff was a “precocious 14-year-old” when she experienced “a period of what might have been called depression“. She didn’t seek treatment, however. “I didn’t want to take anything that would stop me reading my philosophy books.” Luckily, she changed schools, met “a lovely boyfriend” and was happy again. “I expect my resistance was coloured by my parents’ general stoicism,” she writes in her new book, Chemically Imbalanced: The making and unmaking of the serotonin myth.

Moncrieff cautions that “none…

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