Depression has no common cause or common set of symptoms. I read a paper that likened it to a watershed, with tributaries feeding into a general pool of malaise. The watershed varies from person to person, and affects their internal “ecosystem” differently.

Maybe it’s a bit cute, but with this understanding, I think the headline is not shocking. We will never find the one cause of depression because there isn’t one.

In my opinion, our best bet is more personalized medicine: helping people identify which rivers are filling up their lake of depression. For most people it will be a weighted combination of many things, but I think there will usually be some principal components.