LAUSR

We thank all authors for the six commentaries on ‘Depression: Why Drugs and Electricity are not the Answer’ (Read & Moncrieff, 2022). We are sorry we cannot address all their points in the space available. Pariante quotes from Hippocrates: ‘from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, grieves and tears’ (Hippocrates goes on to suggest that madness arises from excessive ‘moistness’ of the brain). This biological reductionism is a contentious position that is central, with varying subtly, to the commentaries by Aftab et al., Meechan et al., Pariante, and Goldberg and Nasrallah, exemplified by the latter’s description of depression as a ‘potentially fatal brain syndrome’.