A comment on a criticism of Will Self

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9 August

In a reply to an article by Will Self in The Guardian's Review, Max Dunbar wrote this piece, which I now quote at the beginning of my comment :


It’s by the novelist Will Self, who makes several big assertions: first that ‘no fixed correlation has been established, despite intensive study, between levels of serotonin in the brain and depression.’


If this is 'a big assertion', which usually means that someone is claiming something unreasonable, something that cannot be proved, then, in reply to Self, there is nothing that addresses this point that he makes :

Much hangs on his assertion, because low levels of serotonin (and hence wanting to inhibit serotonin's re-uptake in the brain (or parts of it) with Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors, so that it is around for longer) might be cause or effect, and I understand it to be correct that decades of work have not established which.

The corollary is that, if low serotonin is the effect of someone being in depression, and that their response to their life and what is happening in it is the cause, then questions arise not in relation to clinical depression, but to conditions such as bi-polar disorder, where there is supposed to be a chemical imbalance.

We could be looking at low levels of serotonin (depression), or high ones of dopamine (high mood) : do life-events make someone's mood high, and then high levels of dopamine result, or vice versa, and why, if that is still a question, does the pharmaceutical business still not know the answer ?

Maybe not such a big assertion after all... ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)