Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Kanojia

But we're also seeing a spike in symptom severity.

So not only are more people depressed than they've ever been that we're aware of, but the severity of depression seems to be on the rise.

The bigger problem, though, is that our treatments for depression don't appear to be working.

And that's what today's video is about.

Understanding that not all kinds of depression are the same.

And furthermore, we're going to dive into this concept of existential depression, which is really, really scary in a lot of ways because it doesn't fit the mold of what we think of as depression.

So let's start by like understanding a couple of evolutions recently that we've discovered in psychiatry.

So a lot of people think that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance of serotonin.

And if we improve someone's serotonin transmission by giving people antidepressants, it'll work great, right?

So we'll basically be able to treat it.

But there was a really interesting paper that came out in 2022 that basically found that

The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lower serotonin activity or concentrations.

OK, so this is still somewhat up for debate.

I think that a lot of treatments involving serotonin do help people with depression.

But I think that this idea that there's like depression is caused by just a chemical imbalance, that if we correct the chemical imbalance, everything will be fine.

That's not entirely true.

So in my experience as a psychiatrist, about one third of patients who are depressed will benefit substantially from an antidepressant medication.

The problem is that for those other two thirds of people, it won't help very much because the origin of their depression is a little bit different.

And this is where we're going to dive into existential depression.

So this is what I want you all to think about.