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
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, sure. High levels in the brain don’t necessarily make you happy and low levels don’t necessarily make you sad. We know antidepressants help severely depressed people recover but they do pretty much nothing to people who are mildly depressed except give them side effects. Antidepressants increase serotonin so people wondered if high serotonin makes you happy. The real story is more complicated. Antidepressants probably have other ways they help depressed people and happiness is probably a lot more complicated than high serotonin.
Outside of the brain serotonin does very different things. The name sero tonin kind of means toning of the blood (think serum toner). Serotonin does funny things to the “vascular tone” and by this I mean how strongly the blood vessels contract. It seems to cause both construction and dilation, or both squeezing shut and opening.
If we gave a tablet that raised body serotonin outside of the brain you would probably go pale then red and get a horrible headache. Oh and diarrhoea. And maybe nausea.
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