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
Among other reasons that others have discussed, Serotonin wouldn’t make it past the “Blood/Brain Barrier” so it wouldn’t travel from the bloodstream to the brain. So just on a practical level injecting it or giving yourself a shot isn’t an option.
Because our neurotransmitters metabolize into neurotoxic agents, an excess results in long-term brain damage. Ie, methamphetamine, and MDMA, these drugs aren’t inherently neurotoxic but the toxicity from their use come from more neurotransmitter metabolites which are charged and destroy cell walls killing brain cells.
We are, kind of.
This is how anti-depression medication works. Current anti-depressants are SSRI type drugs which means ‘selective serotonin re-uptake Inhibitors’.
Basically our brains release serotonin naturally and these drugs stop it being reabsorbed, thereby increasing our expose to it and having a similar effect to what you are asking about.
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter; it is one of several messengers in our brains. It does not just carry happy messages. All of the neurotransmitters pull double, triple, quadruple, etc. duty.
When we say it’s the ‘Happy Messenger’ we’re being very simple to the point of being wrong. It also carries the messages for: rewards, learning, eating, temperature, pooping, and many others. We’re still learning more and more about Serotonin.
Because it does over a dozen different things we do not take Serotonin pills. It would not go to the right place and deliver the right message. It might make you accidentally very hungry or make your temperature very hot.
We take medicine that targets the sad house in our brain, the house that keeps its doors closed to the happy messenger. With the right medicine the sad house keeps their doors open long enough for the right amount (hopefully) of happy messages to get through.
Lot’s of people, including myself, use MDMA from time to time. While it’s not exactly an injection of straight serotonin, in effect it accomplishes the same thing. It makes you incredibly happy, however the come-down from it can be pretty miserable as it can mean that you are serotonin deficient. There are several ways to counter this, like by taking 5HTP, but that isn’t a perfect solution and taking MDMA really is stealing happiness from tomorrow.
Serotonin does not directly cause pleasure, and neither does dopamine for that matter. If any neurotransmitter is established to cause pleasure in the normal sense of the word, it would be endorphins (endogenous opioids).
Nothing will make you happy except re-aligning your life with the Higher Purpose – that He who sent you into this life expects for you. Until you realize this, the spirit in you will remind you of the wrongness of your current life direction.
Change your understanding of life, or you’ll all perish! (Luke 13.5)
It’s weird. The brain is made up billions of interconnected neurons. Networks of these neurons work together and with other networks to regulate behavior, emotion, movements, and all other brain functions conscious or unconscious. SSRIs are a class of medications that block a channel of communication between individual cells, causing the network around it to change. Whats funky is that we can’t predict how it changes—all we know is that when we pull on this metaphorical lever, some peoples mood and anxiety get better.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044645/
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).
Serotonin exists mainly in billions of individual neural synapses, that have no connection to the blood stream, so it’s pretty hard to get it where it’s effective.
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