I'm a Bayesian, and looking at the posts here, I'd say the probability distribution of this probability is beta(5,2). The HDR runs from around 40 to 97 percent and it peaks around 0.8 so what you and the other guys are saying, plus a non-informative prior, agrees with what they say.

You're just one of the unlucky beta(2,5). Too bad.

This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness.

If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms.

I say this because over time, more and more "mental" illnesses have been recategorized as physical or genetic conditions that happen to have mental symptoms, including schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome, both of which respond dramatically to neurological treatments, and not at all to psychological treatments.

This change in the status of "mental" illnesses was recently recognized by the director of the NIMH, who in Scientific American said, "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient's illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely "mental," and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."

Reference: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...

I bet there are few here that don't already believe that. Further, whether the article is correct or not, depression is a physical illness with mental symptoms.

And I'm very glad the medical world has moved past the idiocy of the early and mid-20th century beliefs around mental illness. Maybe now we can get to some effective treatments.

My money is on pharmacology being only a single piece of the treatment, with many required (diet, exercise) to achieve full health. But hopefully a pill will help people have enough hope and energy to fulfill the rest of the treatment.

Brain injuries and hormonal problems are hardware.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a database problem.

Illogic and a tendency to over-simplify or rely on metaphors are software bugs. grin

Of course, the software and database are built in self-modifying firmware, so physical and mental issues do interact in interesting ways.

Well, there is a level on which it is, in that "software" is just hardware writ small. That is, all software that exists and actually runs on a computer exists in the form of physical configuration of states of matter, not as some non-physical entity. This was obvious in the case of some early computers where "programs" were macroscopic wiring configurations, but it is no less true of modern computers.

The artificial distinction between hardware and software can be a very useful tool in thinking about computer issues, but it isn't really true in the fundamental sense.

Certainly. But psychology's track record in identifying and "treating" mental illnesses is such that many are now looking toward neuroscience for (what they hope will be) more effective methods.

So I agree that ignoring the "mind" is unwise, but on the other hand, I don't think it should be given the status of a physical organ or assume (as many psychologists do) that it can lead to empirical science.

Science isn't usually about the experiences of individuals, it's about the experiences of populations. This effect isn't true for each individual in the population.