The authors call for a paradigm shift in mental health care that emphasizes empathy, context, and alternatives to medication as first-line treatments for depression. A new commentary published in The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine traces the development of major depressive disorder (MDD) and criticizes the use of drugs as a first-line treatment. The authors, led by Allen F. Shaughnessy from Tufts University, argue that psychiatry has adopted a “medicine is awesome” outlook as a result of the chemical imbalance hypothesis of depression. The authors write:“This relatively new explanation of depression as a neurochemical imbalance leads to the current privileging of pharmacotherapy over other approaches to treatment. This overreliance on medication may reflect a “medicine is awesome” stance that biases clinicians toward medical interventions.