I take Melatonin most nights to sleep better. Sure would love to have a serotonin pill as well.
In: Biology
Ever taken ecstasy? It causes the release of dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine from nerves, and makes you feel really happy and empathetic.
Then it wears off, you crash off it because you’ve used all your serotonin and dopamine up, and you feel terrible. If you take it too often you can also permanently damage your serotonin and dopamine levels and cause untreatable depression, and if you take too much you can get serotonin syndrome and potentially die.
If you were constantly taking an external source of serotonin, your body would acclimatise to it and may stop producing its own, to disastrous effects if you stopped the medicine suddenly.
People would rapidly abuse any drug that made them feel euphoric, which is why the SSRIs other commenters have mentioned are safer for you; they help people feel normal rather than high.
Serotonin is thought to have a major role in how our gut functions, so we wouldn’t want to fiddle with this either.
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