From a layman’s perspective they are all described as happy brain chemicals. What’s the role that they play that makes them different from each other?
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The result of a multi-decade marketing campaign by drug makers trying to simplify things for a TV audience, and a good-faith effort by psychiatrists trying to condense 8+ years of schooling into a two minute soundbite for consumption by their patients, has resulted in the general public accepting an explanation of dopamine, serotonin, and the rest that is self-contradictory and simply doesn’t make sense.
For example, on social media, you’ll see people saying things that make them feel happy are their “daily dose of serotonin“ or “dopamine“ with equal levels of total confidence. Well, which one is it?
Or, you see a question that pops up on the sub a lot: if dopamine makes you feel good, why can’t we just inject dopamine to make depression go away?
The answer is: it’s not that simple. Obviously. And it never has been. But the real explanation is not very satisfying, so people tend to latch on to the easier, if incorrect answers, because they are “good enough.“
These things are called “neurotransmitters“ for a reason. They help send signals from one part of your brain to the other. In this, they are mostly like electricity in a complex computer system.
Think of it this way: Reddit is a very complicated beast, formed of many types of content across many types of subs. There is a lot going on, not all of which you even notice or see, spread across a huge number of physical servers. Ultimately, those servers are a bunch of transistors flipping on and off based off of electrical signals.
When you go to your Reddit homepage, you get a feed of content that reflects all of those servers and all those electrical signals working together in a certain way, based off of what you have liked, where you have commented, and a bunch else, to serve up a certain selection of content for you to see.
Now, say that someone shows up at a Reddit Doctors office saying their homepage is nothing but super depressing content about sad puppies. Where do you start?
Well, there’s a couple possibilities. One is that they have developed habits of liking or commenting on sad puppy content in a way that has trained the site to simply show them that by default.
But another possibility is that something within the actual Reddit servers has broken. Perhaps the servers that primarily host the *happy* puppy content are suffering from an electrical blackout or brown out, and so can’t balance out the negative content in your feed. In this case, correcting the problem by providing more electricity to those servers will help.
But now, let’s throw a wrinkle into the explanation: There is only one kind of electricity that computers use. But there are a few different kinds of neurotransmitters. And different “servers“ in your brain use different forms of electricity to talk to each other. To make matters worse, most use all forms of them at the same time, but at different levels!
So, when we say that dopamine makes you happy, what we really mean is that the servers that provide “happy content” tend to use dopamine to function more than others. But the dopamine *does not “cause” happiness* any more than “electricity” “causes” Reddit to show you cute puppies in your feed. It is lumping together cause and effect in a way that doesn’t make sense.
If you are not actually suffering from a lack of electricity to those servers, then simply “adding more electricity“ isn’t going to result in more happy puppies in your feed. Doubly so if you add the wrong kind. In fact it might actually cause the servers to blow up or malfunction in a completely new and exciting way.
Worse, while you can simply reach into a computer and measure whether it’s getting enough electricity, we have no way of reaching into your brain to measure whether it’s getting enough dopamine, serotonin, or anything else. We have to guess based off of the content of your feed. That’s why we often have to give you one drug, check your feed, try another drug, check your feed a month later… etc.
But maybe there is no problem with your neurotransmitter levels at all — maybe it’s that you’ve just clicked on so many posts about sad puppies that it’s now all that your feed shows you. In that case, simple talk or behavioral therapy (i.e. “here are ways to go find and click on more happy puppies”) could work by itself without drugs.
Maybe there *was* a neurotransmitter problem that we fixed with drugs, but because sad puppies was all your feed showed you for years, it’s all you clicked on. And so now, even though the electrical problem is fixed, it’s *still* all that your feed shows you. So maybe you need both drugs and therapy.
Does that make sense? I know it’s hard to understand, and I know it’s unsatisfying, but hopefully it helps explain why this question is so complicated. “Dopamine is the happy drug, and serotonin is the calm drug“ is easier to market, and easier to explain to patients. It’s “good enough” in most cases. But that often just leads to more questions, and sticking to the simple answer just results in contradictions and confusion.
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