You May Want To Try This Before Believing Depression Is Caused By A Chemical In The Brain
I t is often claimed that the cause of depression is a chemical deficiency in the brain. Here is a simple one minute test to see for yourself if this is true or not.
The One Minute Moving Finger Test
Before asking if a chemical in the brain causes depression, let us ask a simpler question:
If I cut my arm off, then can I move the fingers on that arm?
Most reasonable people will respond ‘No’.
But we may also ask:
If I cannot move the fingers on my hand, does that mean that the arm connected to that hand is cut off?
Most reasonable people will again respond ‘No’: it is very well possible to have fingers that do not move and my arm not be cut off. Therefore, cutting my arm off is a sufficient but not necessary condition for me not to move my fingers on that arm.
Now apply this intuitive reasoning to depression:
If someone has a specific chemical imbalance in the brain, then someone has a depression,
but this does not mean to say,
If someone has a depression, then someone has a specific chemical imbalance in the brain.
If you were able to verify the reasoning of these two inferences, then we have constructed a refutation. More specifically, there is a refutation of the hypothesis that a chemical imbalance in the brain is a necessary condition for a depression: it is only a sufficient condition, a possibility, not a necessity. To believe it would be necessary, is precisely that: a belief. This is because ‘if a specific chemical imbalance in the brain’ is true, this is sufficient to guarantee a depression, but ‘if a specific chemical imbalance in the brain’ is false, then there can still be a depression, therefore it is not necessary. There are numerous everyday examples of the non-necessity of the chemical conditions of depression or moving fingers: just as numerous people can be hypnotized into a depression, they can also be hypnotized so that they cannot move a finger, yet neither have an organic anomaly causing such dysfunctions.
If you wish to stop reading here, then at least you will have had an introduction to a simple test of validity that is often bypassed in medical and ‘applied’ science journals on depression ( or any other mental disorder). You may want to ask why, or why the average psychiatrist would not present this to his/her patients, but the response would take us further than this simple writing. I have given further details and the context of this argument in How To Be Treated For A Mental Illness You Don’t Have and De-centralizing Depression.
The Logic Problem
For those who care to work on the logical problem further, let’s begin to formalize it by stating:
‘If p, then q’ does not imply ‘if q, then p’
Stated logically, this means the ‘if, then’ conditional is not equivalence. That is to say, the conditional (if p, then q), is not the same thing as the converse, ( if q, then p).Or if they are the same, then p and q are equivalent and there is no longer a problem of cause and effect.
i/ (if p, then q) and (if q, then p) is equivalent to ( p is equivalent to q)
The depression-is-a-chemical-in-the-brain models will often claim that a chemical imbalance is a necessary condition of a depression. That is to say, that there cannot be a depression without a chemical imbalance in the brain. No doubt, this manner of speaking may permit a certain clientelism, but our simple test above has shown this is wishful thinking since a chemical imbalance is only a sufficient condition.
Again, to claim the chemical imbalance is also necessary would entail that the conditional becomes an equivalence: not only p implies q, but q implies p¹. Thus, loosing the problem of causality since the cause would be indistinguishable from the effect.
To conclude, psychologists have always recognized that many people are depressed that have no chemical imbalances, just as there are people who cannot move fingers who have no physiological problems. What is rarely recognized, however, is that these intuitive refutations of the depression-is-a-chemical-in-the-brain models are just examples of a more fundamental logical impossibility.
Indeed, until these problems of implication are worked through seriously, there is little need to settle for the claim or belief, whether by an expert or not, that a chemical imbalance or physical dysfunction is the cause of a depression.
[1] In the conditional ‘if p, then q’, ‘p’ is at the place of the sufficient condition and ‘q’ is at the place of the necessary condition. Therefore, I can say, p = ‘my arm is cut off’ is only a sufficient condition for q = ‘my fingers don’t move on that hand’. But for p = ‘my arm is cut off’ to be a necessary condition I must show the converse, ‘if q, then p’ where ‘p’ is now in the position of the necessary condition. To do so, makes p equivalent to q and the causal problem is lost.
Aug. 20, 2019
