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
The simple reason is that we actually have no fucking idea of what cause us to be happy on a regular basis.
The neurotrasmitters-imbalance theory of depression is getting smashed a bit more every day.
Take for example serotonin. We cannot simply drink it, because as other said it cannot pass the blood-brain barrier.
So we use drugs that *can* pass that barrier, and cause your brain to re-absorb less serotonin. By reabsorbing less of it, you have more serotonin available in your brain.
The problem is that you won’t feel better quickly. You will feel better after months of taking the drug.
But the drug is acting every single day! You have more serotonine in your brain every single day!
So why the effect doesn’t start on day 1?
We don’t know. We have some hypotesis, but we don’t know.
This is why having a lot of serotonine in your brain will not make you Happy on a bad day.
Neither injecting nor swallowing serotonin allows your brain to use it because it won’t cross from the blood to the brain.
Some drugs effectively increase the level of serotonin you experience by reducing how much of it your brain clears (eg Prozac) or forcing your brain to dump the serotonin it already has stored (eg MDMA).
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Beer makes you happy too. Then you wake up and your problems are still there. What’s the real difference here between beer and serotonin.
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Because your body is always trying to reach equilibrium and if you start injection serotonin your body will stop making it and possibly reuptake it faster and you’ll need more and more.
My son had a rare neurotransmitter disease where his body didn’t make seratonin or dopamine. This affected everything from sleep to his moods and more importantly, his ability to walk or talk. He couldn’t even lift his head. Nothing we could give him helped that because there isn’t a drug that has been developed that passes the blood brain barrier. He later got gene therapy surgery that greatly improved his quality of life when he started making dopamine on his own. But the blood brain barrier was the main issue with the drugs currently available
Most psychedelics fit into serotonin receptors… with the exception of DMT which also fits into dopamine receptors… so we kind of are!
In addition to what’s already been said, it’s important to know that there are many neurochemicals that affect mood. Seratonin is just one and may not be the main factor in a person’s depression.
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