What do each of them do to brain chemistry and what effects do they have? And how does a professional decide which one would be best suited for someone?
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Mood stabilizers and SSRIs are used for different things. Even though an SSRI sounds like it should be considered a stabilizer because it helps depression, which is bad for your mood, Doctors use the terms a little different than we do as normal people. A mood stabilizer is what a physician would use is for an acute episode where your mood is not stable in any direction. If you are depressed your mood is stable, it is depressed but it isn’t changing. Someone who is having a psychotic episode or is experiencing a manic episode will have a mood that is in flux. Using something like haloperidol helps the brain steady itself within hours for pills and minutes for an injection. Someone who is having an acute episode can go from barely lucid to being able to communicate with their doctors when treated with a stabilizer. SSRIs just don’t do that.
Surprisingly, a lot psychiatric medications are not well understood from the mechanism of action standpoint, so when you look up haloperidol it says “it is thought to block D2 receptors in the brain…” Similarly, with SSRIs, they block serotonin from being absorbed by neurons thereby increasing serotonin activity. This is based on the monoamine hypothesis. This might be totally right, but so far conclusive proof of the posited mechanisms of action are lacking.
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