Letter to the Editor | A response to "Please, stop changing your profile pictures"
(02/12/14 1:58am)
This week, a member of the Penn community wrote a guest column about the recent Facebook movement started by Eve Bowers. It can certainly be difficult with the stigma surrounding depression and mental illness to speak out as she did. Nonetheless, in her earnest attempt to critique society’s misunderstanding of the etiology of depression, she propagated a reductionist view of the illness: that the cure to mental illness lies in a single pill that modulates a single dysregulated neurotransmitter (I’m not putting antidepressants down — I take them myself, and they have undoubtedly saved my life).