How does depression/anxiety medication change someone’s attitude so drastically?
In: Biology
These types of medications generally focus on building up, restoring, or correcting the way your brain uses neurotransmitters. This allows your brain to behave closer to the way a normal brain behaves. Neurotransmitters do exactly what it sounds like they do; they allow your brain to communicate with itself and your body correctly. When they’re not working the right way, your brain doesn’t respond correctly to stimuli.
Think of it like having a broken leg all the time. With depression/anxiety, you’re just walking around trying to get by with a broken leg for your whole life. It hurts, it’s exhausting, and no one seems to understand that you have a broken leg. You can’t do the same things that they can do, but they don’t seem to notice or care. You feel helpless, you feel like an outcast, and you feel like no one sympathizes because all they do is compare your broken leg to the sprained ankle they had that one time. And because your neurotransmitters aren’t behaving correctly, sometimes it feels like you don’t even have a broken leg, so you try to do things that an able-bodied person can do, and you end up failing and you feel even worse about it.
With proper treatment (depression/anxiety medication and therapy), your doctor is giving you a cast, painkillers, and crutches. You can get around a lot easier, you aren’t in so much pain all the time, and eventually it’s going to heal and you can take the cast off, stop using the crutches, and stop taking the painkillers, and you’re going to be more-or-less the same as everyone else. The feeling of freedom and joy that you get from no longer having the broken leg that you’ve had your entire life is going to cause a massive change in personality. You’re going to be comparing that miserable, painful, disabled life that you had before to this new, pain-free, fully able life that you’re living now. Suddenly **everything** is better.
Common ones are serotonin reuptake inhibitors I think, they stop your body absorbing the happy hormones again so they get chance to build up in your system.
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