Serotonin is the hormone what makes us happy, so why aren’t we just injecting it into our body/taking it as tablets to get out of misery on command?
In: Biology
There’s two reasons.
The first is serotonin doesn’t make you happy – maybe if it did we could inject it. Some people with depression do better on tablets that “increase your serotonin” but many don’t, and depression isn’t unhappiness, and there’s a lot more going on.
The second reason is you have to get the right amount of serotonin in the right place. The antidepressant drugs you’re probably thinking of increase serotonin in a particular place – the gap between two nerves in part of your brain. That seems to work with some depression, like I said.
But there’s a tumour that some people get that makes and releases lots of serotonin into the gut. The people who get that tumour don’t get happy and relaxed. They get diarrhoea and maybe they die.
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