4.1. Causal beliefs about own depression
This large sample of AD users places somewhat greater emphasis on the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion in understanding their own depression than the studies, summarised in the Introduction, of the public׳s beliefs (depressed or not), or the current sample ( Read et al., 2014b), does about depression in general. The current sample also differed from the 191 primary care patients in the USA, for whom ‘stress’ was the only cause endorsed by more than half the sample as a cause of their own depression ( Brown et al., 2007). Nevertheless, despite decades of attempts to persuade the public that feeling depressed is a medical type illness with predominantly bio-genetic causes, the public continues to hold a multifactorial model and to place great weight on life events such as stress at work and at home, relationship problems and loneliness. They do so even when experiencing depression, even when meeting with medical practitioners about that depression, even when receiving a biologically based treatment, and even when they experience that treatment as helpful.
The range of ‘other’ causes demonstrates the breadth of explanations used by AD recipients, some of which are not captured by studies that use only pre-determined closed questions.