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
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.
First, serotonin doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier, so no matter how much you put into your body, none of it will reach your brain, which is where it needs to be to affect brain processes like mood.
Second, our bodies are pretty finely tuned machines. They want everything to operate in a pretty narrow window. Having more of something than there’s supposed to be completely throws off this balance and would wreak havoc. Too much serotonin can literally kill you. Too much of *anything,* even things we need to live, like oxygen and water, will kill you. Messing around with the chemical balance of our bodies beyond that narrow window is very bad.
Third, and this ties in with the above point, is that serotonin does a bunch of other stuff in the body besides regulating mood. It’s involve in sleep, digestion, immune response, tissue regeneration, and more. Messing around with serotonin would not just throw your brain into chaos but the entire rest of your body as well.
One thing to add that others haven’t mentioned yet it’s that hormones like seratonin have multiple roles, this is why depression and antidepressant meds have such a wide range of symptoms and side effects. Seratonin is also involved in aggression and hunger as well. Adding extra to or bodies could meet with these other functions just as easily as happiness.
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MDMA is a drug that allows more serotonin to accumulate in the synapses. This drug makes you feel really good and would get you out of misery awfully fast. It does not produce more serotonin so you would crash pretty hard after it used up making you feel miserable until a sufficient amount has been made. You could step this up further by taking an SSRI like fluoxetine, this could potentially increase the effects of MDMA making you feel even better for longer. However, I would not recommend trying MDMA and especially not with an SSRI as MDMA is illegal and the likelihood of serotonin syndrome with both drugs would be really high.
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