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
Lots of reasons:
– Serotonin cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. Ingesting or injecting it would have no effect.
– The correct serotonin levels can vary a lot from person to person, and too much can cause some *very* bad effects.
– Presuming you could somehow get serotonin into the brain, your brain would see all this excess serotonin floating around and stop producing it on its own. You then become wholly dependent on the external serotonin.
– Low serotonin levels are not always the cause of depression. Personally, SSRIs (drugs that slow *removal* of serotonin) don’t work for me. I have to take drugs which act on *dopamine* (welbutrin).
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