4 ms·
What I find worrying about anti-depressants and how used is the approach. Somebody has low levels of serotonin and the anti-depressants increase this. Soon as
by Zenst 13y ago
What I find worrying about anti-depressants and how used is the approach. Somebody has low levels of serotonin and the anti-depressants increase this. Soon as they stop taking them there body goes even lower than they were before as no artificial stimulus.
So why they don't use controlled environment drugs to lower levels of serotonin and when they stop taking them then they are naturally going to have higher levels.
See in the past many people would at weekends go for a drink, this was the norm, drink is a depressant, but in groups the effects balance out as your amongst friends and you associate any negative feeling to a hangover/the drink. Once you remove a logical reason for being down then people have no crutch to blame it on other than themselves and that begins the downward spiral.
Also many people who are depressed do not sleep well, be it pain of other reasons and sadly those reasons get ignored as easier to give them the new asprin known as anti-depressants.
Also serotonin is part of a cyclic system related to melatonin, which helps us sleep so can see a correlation right there. But do they prescribe melatonin, no. Why not - well because that is natural and hard to copyright, this means no drug company wants to invest in a low-profit easy copyable approach and on top of that nobody pays for medical trials so it does not get upon approved prescription lists.
Sadly many natural approaches medicine wise are ignored as they have not gone thru medical trials to get approval for prescription and that is all down to no drug company can make profit out of them and none of them want to pay for a trial that others can use as no copyright upon the drugs.
Rather sad situation when you step back and look into the details and very depressing.
- shawnz 13y agoCentral nervous system depression (what alcohol causes) is not the same thing as clinical depression (what anti-depressants aim to treat).
- willcannings 13y agoPeople with depression do not generally have low serotonin levels, and it's unlikely low serotonin is the cause of chronic depression. If it was, serotonin agonists would be effective much faster than the 4-8 weeks they currently take. There's some evidence that increased serotonin levels modulate glutamate after about 4 weeks, and glutamate antagonists like Ketamine are effective on depression more rapidly than serotonin agonists (as quick as 40m in some studies). Also the depression effect of alcohol is completely different to chronic depression, any mood effects you feel during a hangover are likely related to reduced dopamine. Sleep is very important though, and, in Australia at least, melatonin is commonly prescribed for sleep issues that have a psychiatric cause.
- joesmo 13y ago"Blood levels of serotonin are measurable -- and have been shown to be lower in people who suffer from depression – but researchers don't know if blood levels reflect the brain's level of serotonin. "Also, researchers don't know whether the dip in serotonin causes the depression, or the depression causes serotonin levels to drop. "Although it is widely believed that a serotonin deficiency plays a role in depression, there is no way to measure its levels in the living brain." -- (http://www.webmd.com/depression/features/serotonin http://www.webmd.com/depression/features/serotonin)