Depression has had a lot of conflict in the medical world and in society. Some believe that when a person has depression they are making it up in their head, and others base their belief on scientific facts and research about depression. The major thesis of this book is deciding whether or not depression is a real medical disease, or is it just something that society wants us to believe. The book overall was easy to follow, and the author used a lot of facts to back up what he was trying to prove. Some of the reading was confusing because I felt that he was repeating himself. In the end he supported what he was theorizing. Before reading this I believed that depression is a real medical disease and still do, but after reading this I have more
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Betty Twarog discovered the neurotransmitter serotonin, and wrote a paper about it but it did not get published until much later because the idea that there was new knowledge about the brain went against everything any doctor learned about the nervous system during the 1900s (Greenberg 2010). Later on we learn that an imbalance of the neurotransmitter serotonin is what causes depression. Once this was discovered, antidepressant drugs began coming out to try to “cure” the disease around the 1980s (Greenberg 2010). With these new found medications that are said to “cure” being unhappy, there are people out there that are going to abuse them. I think that the author was getting at the concept that depression is a real disease and that there are people that actually have the disease, but there are people who think that they have depression because they are not happy for a couple of days and then go to their doctor to beg to get on medication for it even though they really might not need it. In a way I think that the author is saying that society has a major impact on us in terms of illness because if drug companies only made medication for
Betty Twarog discovered the neurotransmitter serotonin, and wrote a paper about it but it did not get published until much later because the idea that there was new knowledge about the brain went against everything any doctor learned about the nervous system during the 1900s (Greenberg 2010). Later on we learn that an imbalance of the neurotransmitter serotonin is what causes depression. Once this was discovered, antidepressant drugs began coming out to try to “cure” the disease around the 1980s (Greenberg 2010). With these new found medications that are said to “cure” being unhappy, there are people out there that are going to abuse them. I think that the author was getting at the concept that depression is a real disease and that there are people that actually have the disease, but there are people who think that they have depression because they are not happy for a couple of days and then go to their doctor to beg to get on medication for it even though they really might not need it. In a way I think that the author is saying that society has a major impact on us in terms of illness because if drug companies only made medication for