From personal experience it seems like if you have depression or anxiety problems the first thing is SSRIs, and they don't even bother trying anything else. Not that I'm 100% against pills. It's good we have these things as a tool to help, but it seems to be being overused.
People hear "chemical imbalance" and they think that therefore nothing but a chemical can fix it, because people don't make the connection that everyday things are setting off chemical reactions in their heads, particularly if when something they experience sets off strong changes in mood. Yet as I read I noticed more and more scientific articles talking about how certain behaviors would correlate with chemical changes. For example, meditation temporarily raises serotonin levels (though some people use it excessively, transcendental meditation is particularly dangerous because its goal is to completely eliminate suffering which is unrealistic and promotes one to pretend negative emotions aren't happening or freak out when one fails to completely eliminate negative thoughts and emotions and so leads to high levels of anxiety and even problems such as suicidal ideation in the long term. There's no such thing as transcendence/perfection outside of human mental constructs, so trying to achieve this will make you go crazy.) But I digress,
Perhaps elevating one's own serotonin levels through serotonergic activities (what people tend to refer to as "things that make me relaxed") is a skill that is underdeveloped and that is why the brain is chronically producing low levels of serotonin. Yet, this is rarely ever addressed by psychiatry when someone is depressed or anxious. Every psychological office should have pamphlets with the best scientific data on what sorts of activities have been found to cause changes in the main neurotransmitters. But I suppose less people would be buying pills if they did that.
