ABSTRACT
In “Reproductive Steroids and Depression: The Brain in Context,” David Rubinow makes three large and important points about how to understand human illness, mental disorders, and suffering. First and most important: context matters. Generalizations in biology or medicine will only get you so far, and they will not even get you there if you do not understand the details behind the generalizations. (Rubinow also talks about differential cells sensitivity and differential disease susceptibility, but that is just another way of talking about context. Some contextual elements are external, and some are internal.) Second: hormones touch just about every aspect of our brains’ functioning and are causally implicated in most of the chronic diseases of the Western world. Third: genetic differences explain differences in our physiological and psychological responses to a variety of stressors.
