You’re a nurse. You speak the language of biology. You’ve sat in on rounds, you’ve read the charts, you’ve probably even heard the words “chemical imbalance” used as a neat, tidy explanation for a patient’s profound, messy pain. It’s a clean diagnosis. It’s simple. It’s biological.

And now, as you navigate the crushing, complicated weight of your own burnout and grief, you find yourself applying that same diagnosis to yourself. My brain must be broken. My serotonin must be low. This exhaustion, this sadness… it’s a chemical defect.

The lie you’ve been sold—in your medical training and by the culture at large—is that your suffering is a simple, biochemical defect. That your story—the burnout from being a full-time caregiver, the grief for the partner you thought you had, the chronic stress of co-regulating a dysregulated nervous system—is secondary to the chemical problem.

What if the diagnosis itself is the sickness? What if it’s not a scientific fact, but a brilliant marketing slogan that has been holding millions of us hostage for decades?

The Takedown: A Scientific Reckoning

For over 30 years, the “serotonin theory of depression” has been treated as gospel. And for over 30 years, there has been a profound lack of definitive evidence to support it.

Then came the reckoning.

In 2022, a team of researchers led by Dr. Joanna Moncrieff published a massive “umbrella review” in the prestigious journal Molecular Psychiatry. This wasn’t just another study; it was a comprehensive review of decades of research involving hundreds of thousands of participants. It is the most definitive, evidence-based takedown of the chemical imbalance myth ever produced.

Their findings were an earthquake. After analyzing all of the available evidence, the researchers concluded that there is no consistent evidence that depression is caused by a serotonin imbalance.

Let’s be brutally clear:

• They found no difference in serotonin levels between depressed and non-depressed people.

• They found that artificially lowering serotonin in healthy volunteers did not cause depression.

• They found that even studies looking at gene variations, including the serotonin transporter gene, showed no link to depression.

The central, foundational idea that you have been sold about your own brain—that your sadness is a serotonin deficit—is not supported by the science. It was a hypothesis that failed to stand up to scrutiny, but it was kept alive by a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry because it was a simple, profitable story.

The Real Story: Your Body is Keeping Score, Not Making a Mistake

So if it’s not a chemical imbalance, what is it? The truth is infinitely more complex, validating, and hopeful.

Your brain and body are not a faulty machine making random chemical errors. They are a perfectly logical system that is responding to the data of your life. The burnout you feel isn’t a random serotonin dip. It’s the predictable, biological consequence of the chronic, sustained stress you are under. It is a full-system response involving:

• Your Nervous System: Your body is likely stuck in a state of chronic fight-or-flight or freeze, a core concept of our work in trauma recovery.

• Your Hormonal System: Your adrenal glands are likely pumping out the stress hormone cortisol, which has a profound impact on your mood, energy, and sleep.

• Your Immune System: Chronic stress triggers inflammation throughout the body and brain, which is now understood to be a major driver of depressive symptoms.

Your body is not making a mistake. It is keeping an accurate score of the impossible load you have been forced to carry.

The Rebellion: Demand a Therapy That Honors Your Story

This is our rebellion. It is a rebellion against a lazy, pathologizing system that prefers to give you a simplistic label and a prescription rather than engage with the beautiful, messy complexity of your life.

Your mission is to stop seeing yourself as a walking chemical imbalance and start seeing yourself as a human being with a story. You are not a faulty machine. You are a person whose nervous system is responding logically to an impossible situation. Demand a form of Therapy that is interested in your story, not just your symptoms. Demand a clinician who will help you audit the sources of your burnout, not just write you a prescription to mute the alarm.