Why can’t you just inject serotonin to feel happy?
In: 91
By way of comparison:
**”I’m a painter. I want to make a painting of happy people in a cheery, sunny landscape. Those have blue skies. Should I just get a can of blue paint and splash it all over my whole art studio?”**
Neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, GABA, etc. are like different colors of paint that your brain uses to paint itself a picture. But actually making them into *a happy painting* and not *a sick mess* requires a more organized plan than “just throw a bunch of paint around the studio.”
(If you paint the people’s faces and the ground sky-blue, that might just be *more* depressing. And if you swallow the paint while you’re doing it, you’re going to poison yourself. Serotonin-affecting drugs can kill you.)
Popular writers, bloggers, and Internet commenters oversimplify the idea of neurotransmitters so much that it’s hardly even recognizable. For another example, *dopamine* isn’t only used to paint pictures of *things you want* (like love and cocaine); it’s also in the picture of *things you don’t want* … and also the picture of *moving your body* — which is why L-DOPA is a drug for Parkinson’s disease, not for addiction.
(Yes, the [“chemical imbalance” picture of depression](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/05/chemical-imbalance/) was always a huge, huge oversimplification of what medical research actually has to say.)
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