17 ms·

Serotonin selectively influences moral judgment and behavior

240 points by pier25 5y ago

woopwoop 5y ago
The use of the word "prosocial" in the abstract is very confusing to me. They seem to be using it to describe actions which sound good but result in much worse real-world outcomes, right?
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  >worse real-world outcomes This is subjective. Pro social just means that its beneficial for a social relationship(s)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Terry_Roll 5y ago
As does Histamine.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  And yeast (via gut bacteria). I’m pretty sure we have been cultivated to breed more of them, not our decision just because they’re delicious.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    If we've "been cultivated", they're delicious because our (non) ancestors who didn't like the taste got weeded out by evolution.
  - Terry_Roll 5y ago
    Bacteria that's crossed the blood brain barrier can affect behaviour. In European woman, the most common bacteria in a woman's vagina's is Lactobacillus largely due to the milk product consumption in their die. However whilst Western medicine considers Lactobacillus to be a probiotic, other cultures who do not consume milk products in as large a quantity have different bacterial profiles in their vagina's. Japanese people claim to be able to smell gone off milk oozing from the pores of westerners. The presence of a particular strain of bacteria (whose name I dont have to hand right now) in a woman's vagina will also predict whether they have freckles or not. Biology is a fascinating subject and very much open to debate.
    - astrange 5y ago
      > Japanese people claim to be able to smell gone off milk oozing from the pores of westerners. Humans are very good at detecting rancid milk from the smell; I believe nobody's developed a machine better than us yet.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      Japanese people claim to be able to smell gone off milk oozing from the pores of westerners. Not just Japanese who claim this; I've heard this from non-Japanese Asians as well. I think I remember hearing that there were some specific derogatory terms for Westerners based on this smell, but I could be wrong.
- metadat 5y ago
  Are you able to elaborate on this? I take a lot of anti-histamines and haven't noticed any difference other than it helps me medically. But I'd like to be on the lookout so I can be my best self.
  - antics9 5y ago
    I second this. I take antihistamines from April to September. Loratadin absolutely has a negative effect on my mood. Mostly because I feel tired I believe. Switched to Ebastin and no more tiredness. However, I am starting to suspect that it also does affect my mood in some way or another. During winter I take a pill as a precautionary if I’m going to be in any dusty spaces. The day after I sometimes experience mood swings that I cannot explain.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      I have found that n95 masks work wonderfully for working in dusty spaces. A dividend of the pandemic I suppose.
      - selectodude 5y ago
        They sell 3M N95 masks at Home Depot for a reason :)
    - throwaway2331 5y ago
      Have you tried mast-cell stabilizers? Ketotifen is one (albeit, still an antihistamine).
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      Levocetirizine doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier like other antihistamines such as loratadine does.
  - Terry_Roll 5y ago
    It increases IQ, histidine, a precursor for histamine, doubled the IQ of people with downs syndrome in an experiment over several months, but histamine also increases aggression which probably explains why you dont see many aggressive people with Down Syndrome. Aged food & drink is higher in histamine. Red wine more than white wine. Dark spirits more than clear spirits. Red meat more than white meat. It can cause spontaneous erections, 60mg of histamine can be used for erectile dysfunction. Histamine can increase blood saturation levels and help reduce the symptoms of COPD and other respiratory problems. If you consumed alot of histadine, like several heaped table spoons with meals throughout the day, depending on your age and health you will notice some or all of the above. Its one of the fastest amino acids into muscle, its untouched by the liver. I dont know why you are taking anti-histamines, histamine helps the white immune cells move through tissue, it causes inflammation, there is also a histamine feedback loop in the brain which affects sleep patterns, which is why anti-histamines can help people get to sleep, but lots of histamine can improve sleep conversely. Loads of studies exist that can be found on Google Scholar, but multiple chemicals affect peoples personality, and their health. If you want to read up on this, also look at the pathways and other chemicals which work with histidine (or any other amino acid) for that matter.
- cplusplusfellow 5y ago
  Can you expound upon this? As someone with severe allergies I tend to take quite a bit of antihistamines.
  - nick__m 5y ago
    An old antihistamine¹ was used as the blueprint for development of the first commercialized SSRI. Similar first generation antihistamines² also have a significant effect on SERT (serotonin transporter). Reciprocly, the weight gain induced by certain SSRI is tought to be caused by an antihistaminic effect³. It would not be surprising if other antihistamines (at least those that cross the BBB) had similar effects because antihistamines are frequently promiscuous (i.e. they have significant affinities with a lots of targets other than the one that make a drug effective) but I would be surprised if histamine, or its inhibition, was directly (with the exclusion of the miserable feeling that comes with allergies) implicated in moods changes. 1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brompheniramine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brompheniramine 2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorphenamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorphenamine 3- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27593622 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27593622
- captainoats 5y ago
  Mirtazapine is a great example of this and can have profound effects on behavior
o10449366 5y ago
(Just my personal, anecdotal experience - I have strong family history of depression and anxiety on both sides of my family and it's something that's afflicted me since I was a teenager.) I will be extremely hesitant to take antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications ever again after my last experience with them. For me, the medications helped by tempering all of my feelings - I no longer felt sad or anxious, instead I just felt mellow and apathetic about everything. And feeling apathy is an incredibly scary thing because I also no longer derived any joy from my hobbies, from sex, from exercise, etc. I could no longer feel sad but I could no longer feel happy, either. Even worse, I found myself engaging in behaviors I would never have engaged in otherwise, like compulsive lying. My moral code was compromised because I no longer felt the guilt and shame that normally inhibits unscrupulous behavior. I look back on that time now and I think about some of my actions and I feel nauseous. There is value to medications that inhibit or regulate serotonin, and every individual's experience will be slightly different based on their genetics and the circumstances of their life. However, for me, even though I benefited from them at various points in my life (especially as a teenager), as an adult now I'm much more likely to depend on coping strategies I've learned through therapy than medication when it comes to dealing with my mood.
- dave_sullivan 5y ago
  Not sure if you ever tried a DSRI but it could be your serotonin levels are fine but your dopamine levels are out of whack. SSRIs are just one class of drug. Speaking from a history of anxiety and depression, the wrong drugs were not helpful, but the right drugs opened up a whole new version of self. In my case, that was buproprion.
  - qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
    Do these work for panic attacks ? I think anxiety and depression are related. I was prescribed SSRI for anxiety.
    - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
      > I think anxiety and depression are related. I was prescribed SSRI for anxiety. They often accompany one another. I've had panic attacks in the past, and was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I can't claim that bupropion fixes panic attacks proper, and I'm not a doctor, but it does help me with my depression. (I haven't had a panic attack in a long time.) It's not a silver bullet; you can still find yourself in mentally stuck states, the difference is the physical side of things seems to be 'gated' at the low end so that your spiraling down isn't as deep as it is before. There's still a lot of work to do to recognize + slow that descent, but it is a tool to help with that.
therealcamino 5y ago
"Harm aversion" is an interesting lens through which to view people's motivation and behavior. (They mention aversion to social harms specifically, but some of the examples are physical harms.) I've heard of loss aversion and of course risk aversion, but that's a new one for me.
colechristensen 5y ago
Huh, given that something like 15% of Americans are on SSRIs, I wonder how this affects the political landscape (which seems overrun with a new kind of moralizing in the last few decades)
- astrange 5y ago
  If anything a more likely cause is statins in older people, which are known to cause violent rage.
- PeterWhittaker 5y ago
  Reductions in empathy, increases in “hey what’s the harm”... kind of like society over the last few years?
  - astrange 5y ago
    When did society have a lot of empathy? We're nowhere near as crazy right now as 1970, 1930… not even 1990, you should see the violent crime stats then.
- mpol 5y ago
  Ouch, that is a lot. There is something like Serotonin Irritation Syndrome which can cause aggressive feelings and thoughts. Personally I tried to increase my serotonin twice, once with Tryptophan a few years ago and recently with Inositol. Both times I felt very aggressive. Maybe I should use it right before a chess game, who knows it helps ;) It is sometimes mentioned that for people who are sensitive to psychosis (like me) this can be a tipping point towards aggressive behaviour.
  - javbit 5y ago
    I tried an SSRI for a month, after the first week I was getting into more arguments for no reasons. Usually I'll have some (at least vague) lucidity as to why I'm upset, but at that time I didn't and it made me feel quite stupid. Never doing those again.
- 5y ago
echopurity 5y ago
ajuc 5y ago
I wonder how long before people propose to use it for happier society. Just like Stanisław Lem predicted in short story about Altruzine in Cyberiad [1] :) [1] https://books.google.pl/books?id=xhbFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT264&lpg=PT264&dq=Altruizine,+or+A+True+Account+of+How+Bonhomius+the+Hermetic+Hermit+Tried+to+Bring+About+Universal+Happiness,+and+What+Came+of+It.&source=bl&ots=NrMsQdnkro&sig=ACfU3U1ydsVXZI7ixTseKLUWjSFLt_7lUg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwimkZb3oaX1AhUtlYsKHfrMBiUQ6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepage&q=Altruizine%2C%20or%20A%20True%20Account%20of%20How%20Bonhomius%20the%20Hermetic%20Hermit%20Tried%20to%20Bring%20About%20Universal%20Happiness%2C%20and%20What%20Came%20of%20It.&f=false https://books.google.pl/books?id=xhbFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT264&lpg=P...
grouphugs 5y ago
thenerdhead 5y ago
Maybe we are living in the world of "Brave New World" where there will soon be "Soma" pills of different colors depending on how we feel and how we want to feel. The big question is ethics. How far do we go to understand, engineer, and change the very nature of what makes us human? Changing the very negative emotions for the future generation would change the world of great art like the next Poe, Van Gogh, Plath, and more. This changes the very nature of what makes us unique. If everyone is happy, nobody is happy, right?
- imbnwa 5y ago
  >Enhancing serotonin made subjects less likely to reject unfair offers.
nybsop 5y ago
This study tests judgement but then makes conclusions about behavior when behavior was never actually tested. Is this science?
daenz 5y ago
>This harm-avoidant bias after citalopram was also evident in behavior during the ultimatum game, in which subjects decide to accept or reject fair or unfair monetary offers from another player. Rejecting unfair offers enforces a fairness norm but also harms the other player financially. Enhancing serotonin made subjects less likely to reject unfair offers. So essentially a subject with enhanced serotonin was more likely to be exploited? >Enhancing serotonin made subjects more likely to judge harmful actions as forbidden, but only in cases where harms were emotionally salient. What does "emotionally salient" here mean?
- whatshisface 5y ago
  "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic." - Joseph Stalin It's saying that serotonin doesn't make you a better person or more fair in an objective sense, it just strengthens your feelings of empathy, which makes you a better person whenever the good and your feelings about it are by chance aligned.
rossdavidh 5y ago
Just FYI, when reading any article with Marc Hauser as one of the lead authors, one should at least read up on the controversy regarding his methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser#Scientific_misconduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser#Scientific_miscond... This article was published in 2010, he had to resign his faculty position at Harvard in 2011, and was found guilty of scientific misconduct in 2012 by the government Office of Research Integrity.
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  > They concluded that Hauser had fabricated data in one study, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and incorrectly described how studies were conducted. Yeah, not the sexy kind of misconduct.
vadiml 5y ago
So how about daily serotonin injections to all elected officials?
nosianu 5y ago
This reminded me of this BBC article about the brain effects of ordinary drugs: "The medications that change who we are" https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200108-the-medications-that-change-who-we-are https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200108-the-medications-... > They’ve been linked to road rage, pathological gambling, and complicated acts of fraud. Some make us less neurotic, and others may even shape our social relationships. It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains. Why? And should there be warnings on packets? > We’re all familiar with the mind-bending properties of psychedelic drugs – but it turns out ordinary medications can be just as potent. From paracetamol (known as acetaminophen in the US) to antihistamines, statins, asthma medications and antidepressants, there’s emerging evidence that they can make us impulsive, angry, or restless, diminish our empathy for strangers, and even manipulate fundamental aspects of our personalities, such as how neurotic we are. > If these claims are true, the implications are profound. The list of potential culprits includes some of the most widely consumed drugs on the planet, meaning that even if the effects are small at an individual level, they could be shaping the personalities of millions of people.
- e40 5y ago
  Mirapex, given for Parkinson’s, it’s truly scary. There are entire forums dedicated to the broken families due to the gambling auctions caused by it. My brother has been on it for two decades, so my family has gotten to watch the effects first hand.
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
It's crazy how our brains and bodies are just a cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters. Change that mix, and it can change the very nature of who we think we are. Things that you might associate with your very identity, like optimism/pessimism, ability to focus, moral judgment, how collaborative or generous you are, aggressiveness, all can be influenced by hormones or neurotransmitters.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Its really not just a cocktail or mix. Its far more ordered than that and these compounds and receptors are found in very specific areas and circuits
- symlinkk 5y ago
  Yes it brings up uncomfortable questions about free will. Like “why did he murder that guy? did he choose to do it or did the chemicals in his brain force him to?”
  - zwkrt 5y ago
    “Your honor, I claim that the real culprit here is the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe at the Big Bang.”
    - GuB-42 5y ago
      Unfortunately for you the same laws of physics and initial conditions created prisons and you are about to get entangled.
  - n8cpdx 5y ago
    Uncomfortable questions indeed. It is honestly hard to comprehend how people believe in it at all. I understand that people do, but it’s mystifying, like a belief in god or even Santa Claus. Regardless, justice systems (incentives and accountability) and incarceration (incentives, and ideally rehabilitation) have nothing to do with free will. Any connection between free will (presence or absence) and the justice system seems to stems from some weird idea that it is about “punishing bad guys” or balancing some cosmic ledger. It is not. It is about controlling people just enough to ensure the long-term maintenance of society, as imperfect as our current implementation is. Look up Restorative Justice for approaches that focus on restorative outcomes for all involved, eschewing punishment and eye-for-eye thinking. The cancerous cell does not carry any moral value; and neither does the immune system that destroys it. The cell infected by a virus is a victim of its circumstance, but that does not mean the immune system is should not destroy it.
jollybean 5y ago
"Enhancing serotonin made subjects more likely to judge harmful actions as forbidden, but only in cases where harms were emotionally salient. " "Together, these findings provide unique evidence that serotonin could promote prosocial behavior by enhancing harm aversion, " I object to the notion that 'less harm' is necessarily 'pro social'. You can see the emotional attachment to 'harm' which confirms my biases in that people have difficulty mapping the moral issues with harm against their emotional reaction. Case and point: A man robs a bank, is running from police, shooting at them, the police shoot the man, he dies. I believe the 'seratonin' response is to condemn the 'terrible harm' done by the police officers. It takes second order rationalization to contextualize the situation.
neuro_image2 5y ago
I strongly encourage anyone reading this to watch Dr Ben Sessa's lecture on using MDMA to treat addiction and trauma. https://youtu.be/11u7iX4j1tA https://youtu.be/11u7iX4j1tA The reality is, SSRIs and other pharmaceuticals that have been used to treat common psychiatric illnesses (anxiety/depression) have dismal outcomes and fail the vast majority of patients that they have been given to. I'm optimistic that the next few decades will bring about better approaches to these massively underserved (and largely exploited and discarded) people.
- willhinsa 5y ago
  I’ve suffered from depression for 20 years with no relief from many different traditional antidepressant medications and many different modalities of therapy. I received my first MDMA therapy treatment in October of last year. It changed my life. It is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. It feels like I’m feeling emotions for the first time in my life. I had completely lost hope for any kind of improvement in my symptoms, until this. I am so, so thankful I found this, and am so glad that it will (most likely) be becoming legal for use in treatment outside clinical trials in the very near future. So many lives will change for the better. For the first time in a long time, I’m excited to wake up and ring in each new day. Cheers, Will
  - neuro_image2 5y ago
    Thank you for sharing your experience Will. Fortunately there is a growing body of evidence that MDMA and psychedelic assisted therapy could revolutionize the treatment of mental health disorders. Unfortunately, for the last 50 years, governments, industry and the military industrial complex (together with the MSM) have spread lies and scaremongering to block the therapeutic use of these life-changing therapies. Here is another video for anyone wanting to know more about the topic: (Lecture by Prof. David Nutt: The New Psychedelic Revolution) https://youtu.be/1JjzVcfei60 https://youtu.be/1JjzVcfei60
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
davidandgoliath 5y ago
Insert yet another HN thread of people who happily support the covid vaccine because doctors say to get it, but yet in this thread those same people recommend a bunch of alternatives to what someone's doctor suggested/recommended. Medication has absolutely saved my life, and made my life and those around me significantly better. I'm triple vaxxed. Doctors recommended both. YMMV.
- bp0017 5y ago
  not at all trying to contradict you, but I think the discrepancy may be due to people's trust in virology vs psychiatry. Psychiatry has a bad reputation (we were giving people lobotomies not that long ago) and even today, the literature often fails to be as scientifically rigorous as other fields, in my opinion.
  - Nbox9 5y ago
    > the literature often fails to be as scientifically rigorous I don’t think that’s true. I think the sciences of psychiatry/psychology/neurology have several problems that are very unique that make them challenging fields. The literature is scientifically sound in methodology and data-analysis, but these challenges have the field progress slower, and have many false paths. 1. The brain is inherently complex. It might not be the most complex thing we study scientifically, but it’s complexity is a very big issue. 2. It’s really easy for the third-variable problem to have in impact in psychology/psychiatry. A classic example of this is the generalization problem. A study done in the US or France or another Western Democratic Educated country often will have findings that do not apply in Asia or African countries. Large swaths of the literature have questionable generalization, to the point this is often acknowledged inside the literature itself. 3. We have limited tools for studying these fields. The gold standard, the FMRI, requires people to be completely still and in a very artificial environment. This clearly will influence test results. This lack of tools is everywhere. We cannot directly measure happiness. We can ask people if they are happy. We can ask their friends and family if they seem happy. We can measure how much time they smile. If our sample size is large enough we can compare life outcomes like suicide. Every way we have to measure happiness has flaws, which makes drawing conclusions harder. 4. Ethics plays a huge role. We cannot, for example, randomly assign 100 children to play violent video games for 20 hours a week from age 10-18 and assign 100 children to never play these games. Thus any data we have about violent video games and children will not be as clean. We can assume that children that decide to play violent video games probably share other traits and would differ in a lot of ways to children that do not decide to play violent video games. Thus, it will be hard to determine if the violent video games had any impact, or if it was a third variable that many in the violent-video-games cluster share. 5. This happens everywhere, but this field especially is prone to journalists misreporting and misinterpreting the literature.
guerrilla 5y ago
I wonder how this will be taken in metaethics. It seems to almost require a conclusion of emotivism[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism

240 points by pier25 5y ago

The use of the word "prosocial" in the abstract is very confusing to me. They seem to be using it to describe actions which sound good but result in much worse real-world outcomes, right?

netizen-936824 5y ago
>worse real-world outcomes This is subjective. Pro social just means that its beneficial for a social relationship(s)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Terry_Roll 5y ago

As does Histamine.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
And yeast (via gut bacteria). I’m pretty sure we have been cultivated to breed more of them, not our decision just because they’re delicious.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  If we've "been cultivated", they're delicious because our (non) ancestors who didn't like the taste got weeded out by evolution.
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
  Bacteria that's crossed the blood brain barrier can affect behaviour. In European woman, the most common bacteria in a woman's vagina's is Lactobacillus largely due to the milk product consumption in their die. However whilst Western medicine considers Lactobacillus to be a probiotic, other cultures who do not consume milk products in as large a quantity have different bacterial profiles in their vagina's. Japanese people claim to be able to smell gone off milk oozing from the pores of westerners. The presence of a particular strain of bacteria (whose name I dont have to hand right now) in a woman's vagina will also predict whether they have freckles or not. Biology is a fascinating subject and very much open to debate.
  - astrange 5y ago
    > Japanese people claim to be able to smell gone off milk oozing from the pores of westerners. Humans are very good at detecting rancid milk from the smell; I believe nobody's developed a machine better than us yet.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Japanese people claim to be able to smell gone off milk oozing from the pores of westerners. Not just Japanese who claim this; I've heard this from non-Japanese Asians as well. I think I remember hearing that there were some specific derogatory terms for Westerners based on this smell, but I could be wrong.
metadat 5y ago
Are you able to elaborate on this? I take a lot of anti-histamines and haven't noticed any difference other than it helps me medically. But I'd like to be on the lookout so I can be my best self.
- antics9 5y ago
  I second this. I take antihistamines from April to September. Loratadin absolutely has a negative effect on my mood. Mostly because I feel tired I believe. Switched to Ebastin and no more tiredness. However, I am starting to suspect that it also does affect my mood in some way or another. During winter I take a pill as a precautionary if I’m going to be in any dusty spaces. The day after I sometimes experience mood swings that I cannot explain.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    I have found that n95 masks work wonderfully for working in dusty spaces. A dividend of the pandemic I suppose.
    - selectodude 5y ago
      They sell 3M N95 masks at Home Depot for a reason :)
  - throwaway2331 5y ago
    Have you tried mast-cell stabilizers? Ketotifen is one (albeit, still an antihistamine).
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Levocetirizine doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier like other antihistamines such as loratadine does.
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
  It increases IQ, histidine, a precursor for histamine, doubled the IQ of people with downs syndrome in an experiment over several months, but histamine also increases aggression which probably explains why you dont see many aggressive people with Down Syndrome. Aged food & drink is higher in histamine. Red wine more than white wine. Dark spirits more than clear spirits. Red meat more than white meat. It can cause spontaneous erections, 60mg of histamine can be used for erectile dysfunction. Histamine can increase blood saturation levels and help reduce the symptoms of COPD and other respiratory problems. If you consumed alot of histadine, like several heaped table spoons with meals throughout the day, depending on your age and health you will notice some or all of the above. Its one of the fastest amino acids into muscle, its untouched by the liver. I dont know why you are taking anti-histamines, histamine helps the white immune cells move through tissue, it causes inflammation, there is also a histamine feedback loop in the brain which affects sleep patterns, which is why anti-histamines can help people get to sleep, but lots of histamine can improve sleep conversely. Loads of studies exist that can be found on Google Scholar, but multiple chemicals affect peoples personality, and their health. If you want to read up on this, also look at the pathways and other chemicals which work with histidine (or any other amino acid) for that matter.
cplusplusfellow 5y ago
Can you expound upon this? As someone with severe allergies I tend to take quite a bit of antihistamines.
- nick__m 5y ago
  An old antihistamine¹ was used as the blueprint for development of the first commercialized SSRI. Similar first generation antihistamines² also have a significant effect on SERT (serotonin transporter). Reciprocly, the weight gain induced by certain SSRI is tought to be caused by an antihistaminic effect³. It would not be surprising if other antihistamines (at least those that cross the BBB) had similar effects because antihistamines are frequently promiscuous (i.e. they have significant affinities with a lots of targets other than the one that make a drug effective) but I would be surprised if histamine, or its inhibition, was directly (with the exclusion of the miserable feeling that comes with allergies) implicated in moods changes. 1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brompheniramine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brompheniramine 2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorphenamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorphenamine 3- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27593622 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27593622
captainoats 5y ago
Mirtazapine is a great example of this and can have profound effects on behavior

o10449366 5y ago

(Just my personal, anecdotal experience - I have strong family history of depression and anxiety on both sides of my family and it's something that's afflicted me since I was a teenager.) I will be extremely hesitant to take antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications ever again after my last experience with them. For me, the medications helped by tempering all of my feelings - I no longer felt sad or anxious, instead I just felt mellow and apathetic about everything. And feeling apathy is an incredibly scary thing because I also no longer derived any joy from my hobbies, from sex, from exercise, etc. I could no longer feel sad but I could no longer feel happy, either. Even worse, I found myself engaging in behaviors I would never have engaged in otherwise, like compulsive lying. My moral code was compromised because I no longer felt the guilt and shame that normally inhibits unscrupulous behavior. I look back on that time now and I think about some of my actions and I feel nauseous. There is value to medications that inhibit or regulate serotonin, and every individual's experience will be slightly different based on their genetics and the circumstances of their life. However, for me, even though I benefited from them at various points in my life (especially as a teenager), as an adult now I'm much more likely to depend on coping strategies I've learned through therapy than medication when it comes to dealing with my mood.

dave_sullivan 5y ago
Not sure if you ever tried a DSRI but it could be your serotonin levels are fine but your dopamine levels are out of whack. SSRIs are just one class of drug. Speaking from a history of anxiety and depression, the wrong drugs were not helpful, but the right drugs opened up a whole new version of self. In my case, that was buproprion.
- qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
  Do these work for panic attacks ? I think anxiety and depression are related. I was prescribed SSRI for anxiety.
  - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    > I think anxiety and depression are related. I was prescribed SSRI for anxiety. They often accompany one another. I've had panic attacks in the past, and was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I can't claim that bupropion fixes panic attacks proper, and I'm not a doctor, but it does help me with my depression. (I haven't had a panic attack in a long time.) It's not a silver bullet; you can still find yourself in mentally stuck states, the difference is the physical side of things seems to be 'gated' at the low end so that your spiraling down isn't as deep as it is before. There's still a lot of work to do to recognize + slow that descent, but it is a tool to help with that.

therealcamino 5y ago

"Harm aversion" is an interesting lens through which to view people's motivation and behavior. (They mention aversion to social harms specifically, but some of the examples are physical harms.) I've heard of loss aversion and of course risk aversion, but that's a new one for me.

colechristensen 5y ago

Huh, given that something like 15% of Americans are on SSRIs, I wonder how this affects the political landscape (which seems overrun with a new kind of moralizing in the last few decades)

astrange 5y ago
If anything a more likely cause is statins in older people, which are known to cause violent rage.
PeterWhittaker 5y ago
Reductions in empathy, increases in “hey what’s the harm”... kind of like society over the last few years?
- astrange 5y ago
  When did society have a lot of empathy? We're nowhere near as crazy right now as 1970, 1930… not even 1990, you should see the violent crime stats then.
mpol 5y ago
Ouch, that is a lot. There is something like Serotonin Irritation Syndrome which can cause aggressive feelings and thoughts. Personally I tried to increase my serotonin twice, once with Tryptophan a few years ago and recently with Inositol. Both times I felt very aggressive. Maybe I should use it right before a chess game, who knows it helps ;) It is sometimes mentioned that for people who are sensitive to psychosis (like me) this can be a tipping point towards aggressive behaviour.
- javbit 5y ago
  I tried an SSRI for a month, after the first week I was getting into more arguments for no reasons. Usually I'll have some (at least vague) lucidity as to why I'm upset, but at that time I didn't and it made me feel quite stupid. Never doing those again.
5y ago

echopurity 5y ago

ajuc 5y ago

I wonder how long before people propose to use it for happier society. Just like Stanisław Lem predicted in short story about Altruzine in Cyberiad [1] :) [1] https://books.google.pl/books?id=xhbFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT264&lpg=PT264&dq=Altruizine,+or+A+True+Account+of+How+Bonhomius+the+Hermetic+Hermit+Tried+to+Bring+About+Universal+Happiness,+and+What+Came+of+It.&source=bl&ots=NrMsQdnkro&sig=ACfU3U1ydsVXZI7ixTseKLUWjSFLt_7lUg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwimkZb3oaX1AhUtlYsKHfrMBiUQ6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepage&q=Altruizine%2C%20or%20A%20True%20Account%20of%20How%20Bonhomius%20the%20Hermetic%20Hermit%20Tried%20to%20Bring%20About%20Universal%20Happiness%2C%20and%20What%20Came%20of%20It.&f=false https://books.google.pl/books?id=xhbFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT264&lpg=P...

grouphugs 5y ago

thenerdhead 5y ago

Maybe we are living in the world of "Brave New World" where there will soon be "Soma" pills of different colors depending on how we feel and how we want to feel. The big question is ethics. How far do we go to understand, engineer, and change the very nature of what makes us human? Changing the very negative emotions for the future generation would change the world of great art like the next Poe, Van Gogh, Plath, and more. This changes the very nature of what makes us unique. If everyone is happy, nobody is happy, right?

imbnwa 5y ago
>Enhancing serotonin made subjects less likely to reject unfair offers.

nybsop 5y ago

This study tests judgement but then makes conclusions about behavior when behavior was never actually tested. Is this science?

daenz 5y ago

>This harm-avoidant bias after citalopram was also evident in behavior during the ultimatum game, in which subjects decide to accept or reject fair or unfair monetary offers from another player. Rejecting unfair offers enforces a fairness norm but also harms the other player financially. Enhancing serotonin made subjects less likely to reject unfair offers. So essentially a subject with enhanced serotonin was more likely to be exploited? >Enhancing serotonin made subjects more likely to judge harmful actions as forbidden, but only in cases where harms were emotionally salient. What does "emotionally salient" here mean?

whatshisface 5y ago
"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic." - Joseph Stalin It's saying that serotonin doesn't make you a better person or more fair in an objective sense, it just strengthens your feelings of empathy, which makes you a better person whenever the good and your feelings about it are by chance aligned.

rossdavidh 5y ago

Just FYI, when reading any article with Marc Hauser as one of the lead authors, one should at least read up on the controversy regarding his methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser#Scientific_misconduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser#Scientific_miscond... This article was published in 2010, he had to resign his faculty position at Harvard in 2011, and was found guilty of scientific misconduct in 2012 by the government Office of Research Integrity.

radu_floricica 5y ago
> They concluded that Hauser had fabricated data in one study, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and incorrectly described how studies were conducted. Yeah, not the sexy kind of misconduct.

vadiml 5y ago

So how about daily serotonin injections to all elected officials?

nosianu 5y ago

This reminded me of this BBC article about the brain effects of ordinary drugs: "The medications that change who we are" https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200108-the-medications-that-change-who-we-are https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200108-the-medications-... > They’ve been linked to road rage, pathological gambling, and complicated acts of fraud. Some make us less neurotic, and others may even shape our social relationships. It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains. Why? And should there be warnings on packets? > We’re all familiar with the mind-bending properties of psychedelic drugs – but it turns out ordinary medications can be just as potent. From paracetamol (known as acetaminophen in the US) to antihistamines, statins, asthma medications and antidepressants, there’s emerging evidence that they can make us impulsive, angry, or restless, diminish our empathy for strangers, and even manipulate fundamental aspects of our personalities, such as how neurotic we are. > If these claims are true, the implications are profound. The list of potential culprits includes some of the most widely consumed drugs on the planet, meaning that even if the effects are small at an individual level, they could be shaping the personalities of millions of people.

e40 5y ago
Mirapex, given for Parkinson’s, it’s truly scary. There are entire forums dedicated to the broken families due to the gambling auctions caused by it. My brother has been on it for two decades, so my family has gotten to watch the effects first hand.

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

It's crazy how our brains and bodies are just a cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters. Change that mix, and it can change the very nature of who we think we are. Things that you might associate with your very identity, like optimism/pessimism, ability to focus, moral judgment, how collaborative or generous you are, aggressiveness, all can be influenced by hormones or neurotransmitters.

netizen-936824 5y ago
Its really not just a cocktail or mix. Its far more ordered than that and these compounds and receptors are found in very specific areas and circuits
symlinkk 5y ago
Yes it brings up uncomfortable questions about free will. Like “why did he murder that guy? did he choose to do it or did the chemicals in his brain force him to?”
- zwkrt 5y ago
  “Your honor, I claim that the real culprit here is the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe at the Big Bang.”
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    Unfortunately for you the same laws of physics and initial conditions created prisons and you are about to get entangled.
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  Uncomfortable questions indeed. It is honestly hard to comprehend how people believe in it at all. I understand that people do, but it’s mystifying, like a belief in god or even Santa Claus. Regardless, justice systems (incentives and accountability) and incarceration (incentives, and ideally rehabilitation) have nothing to do with free will. Any connection between free will (presence or absence) and the justice system seems to stems from some weird idea that it is about “punishing bad guys” or balancing some cosmic ledger. It is not. It is about controlling people just enough to ensure the long-term maintenance of society, as imperfect as our current implementation is. Look up Restorative Justice for approaches that focus on restorative outcomes for all involved, eschewing punishment and eye-for-eye thinking. The cancerous cell does not carry any moral value; and neither does the immune system that destroys it. The cell infected by a virus is a victim of its circumstance, but that does not mean the immune system is should not destroy it.

jollybean 5y ago

"Enhancing serotonin made subjects more likely to judge harmful actions as forbidden, but only in cases where harms were emotionally salient. " "Together, these findings provide unique evidence that serotonin could promote prosocial behavior by enhancing harm aversion, " I object to the notion that 'less harm' is necessarily 'pro social'. You can see the emotional attachment to 'harm' which confirms my biases in that people have difficulty mapping the moral issues with harm against their emotional reaction. Case and point: A man robs a bank, is running from police, shooting at them, the police shoot the man, he dies. I believe the 'seratonin' response is to condemn the 'terrible harm' done by the police officers. It takes second order rationalization to contextualize the situation.

neuro_image2 5y ago

I strongly encourage anyone reading this to watch Dr Ben Sessa's lecture on using MDMA to treat addiction and trauma. https://youtu.be/11u7iX4j1tA https://youtu.be/11u7iX4j1tA The reality is, SSRIs and other pharmaceuticals that have been used to treat common psychiatric illnesses (anxiety/depression) have dismal outcomes and fail the vast majority of patients that they have been given to. I'm optimistic that the next few decades will bring about better approaches to these massively underserved (and largely exploited and discarded) people.

willhinsa 5y ago
I’ve suffered from depression for 20 years with no relief from many different traditional antidepressant medications and many different modalities of therapy. I received my first MDMA therapy treatment in October of last year. It changed my life. It is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. It feels like I’m feeling emotions for the first time in my life. I had completely lost hope for any kind of improvement in my symptoms, until this. I am so, so thankful I found this, and am so glad that it will (most likely) be becoming legal for use in treatment outside clinical trials in the very near future. So many lives will change for the better. For the first time in a long time, I’m excited to wake up and ring in each new day. Cheers, Will
- neuro_image2 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing your experience Will. Fortunately there is a growing body of evidence that MDMA and psychedelic assisted therapy could revolutionize the treatment of mental health disorders. Unfortunately, for the last 50 years, governments, industry and the military industrial complex (together with the MSM) have spread lies and scaremongering to block the therapeutic use of these life-changing therapies. Here is another video for anyone wanting to know more about the topic: (Lecture by Prof. David Nutt: The New Psychedelic Revolution) https://youtu.be/1JjzVcfei60 https://youtu.be/1JjzVcfei60

deleted 5y ago

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davidandgoliath 5y ago

Insert yet another HN thread of people who happily support the covid vaccine because doctors say to get it, but yet in this thread those same people recommend a bunch of alternatives to what someone's doctor suggested/recommended. Medication has absolutely saved my life, and made my life and those around me significantly better. I'm triple vaxxed. Doctors recommended both. YMMV.

bp0017 5y ago
not at all trying to contradict you, but I think the discrepancy may be due to people's trust in virology vs psychiatry. Psychiatry has a bad reputation (we were giving people lobotomies not that long ago) and even today, the literature often fails to be as scientifically rigorous as other fields, in my opinion.
- Nbox9 5y ago
  > the literature often fails to be as scientifically rigorous I don’t think that’s true. I think the sciences of psychiatry/psychology/neurology have several problems that are very unique that make them challenging fields. The literature is scientifically sound in methodology and data-analysis, but these challenges have the field progress slower, and have many false paths. 1. The brain is inherently complex. It might not be the most complex thing we study scientifically, but it’s complexity is a very big issue. 2. It’s really easy for the third-variable problem to have in impact in psychology/psychiatry. A classic example of this is the generalization problem. A study done in the US or France or another Western Democratic Educated country often will have findings that do not apply in Asia or African countries. Large swaths of the literature have questionable generalization, to the point this is often acknowledged inside the literature itself. 3. We have limited tools for studying these fields. The gold standard, the FMRI, requires people to be completely still and in a very artificial environment. This clearly will influence test results. This lack of tools is everywhere. We cannot directly measure happiness. We can ask people if they are happy. We can ask their friends and family if they seem happy. We can measure how much time they smile. If our sample size is large enough we can compare life outcomes like suicide. Every way we have to measure happiness has flaws, which makes drawing conclusions harder. 4. Ethics plays a huge role. We cannot, for example, randomly assign 100 children to play violent video games for 20 hours a week from age 10-18 and assign 100 children to never play these games. Thus any data we have about violent video games and children will not be as clean. We can assume that children that decide to play violent video games probably share other traits and would differ in a lot of ways to children that do not decide to play violent video games. Thus, it will be hard to determine if the violent video games had any impact, or if it was a third variable that many in the violent-video-games cluster share. 5. This happens everywhere, but this field especially is prone to journalists misreporting and misinterpreting the literature.

guerrilla 5y ago

I wonder how this will be taken in metaethics. It seems to almost require a conclusion of emotivism[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism