When will we stop trusting the 'experts?'

I mean when will *you,* because I already have.

American culture has a weird and destructive obsession with “experts,” the class of people to whom we for some reason feel the need to pay profuse and unrelenting homage on a daily basis. “Experts” in this country set the stage for so much of what we do in our daily lives, from how we eat to how we work to how we sleep to how we talk to each other. It has been this way for decades.

No more perfect an example of this “expert” worship can be found than the persistent decades-long “chemical imbalance” theory of depression, one that was, for all appearances, soundly debunked this week:

A new large-scale review of studies linking serotonin and depression was recently published in the journal Molecular Psychology. The study examines evidence from previous reviews and meta-analyses—in other words, it summarizes and combines evidence from all existing studies, including previous reviews. The results are surprising. The authors find “no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression or that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.”

How about that? Are you surprised? I am not, in fact this is some of the least surprising news I’ve covered in a long time. I have spent a decent bit of time around mental health professionals—more time than I would’ve preferred, unfortunately—and I can say that they have all almost universally espoused the “chemical imbalance” hypothesis regarding depression and/or anxiety. And there has never been a time that the hypothesis did not strike me as kind of unbelievable. The biggest tell was that none of the “experts” advocating this theory could ever quantify the parameters of any one “chemical imbalance,” i.e., I have been told numerous times that I myself suffer from a “chemical imbalance” of my own, but nobody has ever tested my brain chemistry to determine that and indeed nobody has ever even proposed to test it. If a major scientific proposal is based upon factors that nobody even cares about confirming, you can probably be sure that the proposal itself is not very scientific.

In any event what we appear to have here is a clear an unambiguous collapse of a broad-based “expert” consensus, one that has reigned in a major and critical industry for decades and which has doubtlessly seen millions upon millions of people given extremely potent mind-altering drugs for years on end on the basis of a false and now-debunked premise. This surely must be a scandal of historical proportions, the effects of which it will take many years to fully comprehend.

This is but the latest in a seemingly neverending series of “expert” failures in which authoritative figures presume to issue comprehensive dictates on extremely complex subjects. There is, for instance, no way to list the sheerly mind-boggling number of diets, arcane systems of eating, forbidden ingredients and wedges of nutritional advice that “experts” have dispensed over the years and that countless people have clung to like life preservers. When I was growing up, for instance, there was this weird, pervasive belief among many people that the best way for human beings to eat was to “graze,” or to consume “five small meals a day” or something along those lines. None of it made sense, there was never any meaningful basis for making such a claim, but a great many people bought into it, just as they’ve now bought into a new expert opinion that the best way to lose weight is to fast for 16 hours a day and only consume food within a narrow 8-hour window, or something.

We of course have observed countless similar bizarre myths and rituals over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, where “experts” have variously insisted that the safest and healthiest way to exist in public life is to avoid nearly all human contact, to wear moist, filthy strips of cotton across our faces whenever we go out, to keep our children isolated at home for 18 months even though they were at statistically 0% risk from a respiratory virus, and to get injected with untested novel new gene therapies every few months for the rest of our lives even though these things don’t really seem to work very well at all and may have terrible side effects for many people. Does this sound like “expert” opinion to do? Do these sound like people who even remotely know what they are talking about?

Here is a modest proposal: It is fully possible to move through life without reflexively relying on “experts” to adjudicate profoundly complex and multifaceted subjects. Yes, we should trust engineers to build buildings that don’t fall down. Yes, you want a trained surgeon to operate on you when you’re suffering from organ failure. Yes, you want mathematicians and physicists to calculate how to get astronauts to the moon and back without exploding. All of that is stipulated.

The point isn’t to dismiss the kind of expertise that gets you from A to B rather simply and practically, but instead to stop using “experts” as a shorthand for “I don’t want to think too deeply about that.” For instance: If someone tells you that “experts” say depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain, don’t be afraid to question such a claim—that is to say, don’t be afraid of pushing back against “expert” opinion even if you’re not an expert.

There’s a knee-jerk tendency on the part of many people to sneer at such inquiries and say something along the lines of, “Um, are you an expert?” or, “Are you disagreeing with experts?” And it’s okay if your answers are, respectively, “No,” and “Yes.” You can disagree with expert opinion, and you can do so even if you have relatively little knowledge about the subject at hand.

It’s okay to identify the flaws in “expert” opinion. We should be doing much more of it. Maybe, if more people had done so, we wouldn’t have just endured several decades of pumping a huge portion of our population full of drugs in order to balance out a “chemical imbalance” that doesn’t actually appear to exist.