This all started with someone asking for their sources, and the person hasn't given any except to say to Google... which means for all we know the person who then googled ended up in a situation with lots of conspiracy theories. Google famously gives personalized results to an extreme degree especially when you add in differences in search terms.
I will say if you search for "chemical imbalance debunked" as discussed, the first result for me is a paper that also says dyslexia cannot be proved to be a disorder. Which just from vibes feels really conspiratorial, even without making comments on the veracity of the academic paper.
The person who was asked for sources was a different person than the one who quipped that finding said sources yourself is trivial.
> Google... which means for all we know the person who then googled ended up in a situation with lots of conspiracy theories.
If people have low enough media literacy that they cannot distinguish between scientific research published in refereed journals and conspiracy theories, then I cannot help them and it is not my responsibility to pander to their lack of competence.
> just from vibes feels really conspiratorial
Just from vibes? Clearly you are a scientific luminary.
Yeah, the person making the claim never responded. But I was more responding to your comments, specifically:
"Just searching 'chemical imbalance debunked' yields a wide array of sources. So why ask?", and "One of the first search results for me was a paper published in Nature. Other top results were from respected institutions like the NIH and Harvard University. Hardly grifters or crazies."
Those both trivialize the process of finding sources and interpreting them. I picked my top result which was from nih.gov and gave an example of why it's hard for a lay-person to interpret journal entries because it uses field specific terms that come across as wrong or conspiratorial. Heck the paper itself references other papers on other journals that appear legitimate that argue for the chemical imbalance theory, eg an article from JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) from 1993. Just because the source has NIH in it or is in a journal does not guarantee correctness or reliability because time passes and new science is done. The link in question was of a paper from 2006, which we are now further from than the 2006 paper was from the 1993 paper.
I am not claiming to be a scientific luminary and even agree that the chemical imbalance theory that was espoused for years was probably incorrect for many issues. I was just arguing against thinking it's easy to investigate and source claims. It's much easier for the person who is making the claim to provide their sources, and preferably they have a large body of evidence behind them and are recent or even better a source that has done that leg work of reviewing it and distilling it down.
I will say if you search for "chemical imbalance debunked" as discussed, the first result for me is a paper that also says dyslexia cannot be proved to be a disorder. Which just from vibes feels really conspiratorial, even without making comments on the veracity of the academic paper.
[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1518691/]