i don’t have dr burnett on me right now (he has sources for this in the appendix) but:
1. the more recent research suggests that meds (MAOIs and SSRIs and whatever the acronym for the dopamine reuptake inhibitors is) which attempt to raise the water levels of neurotransmitters linked to reward pathways for the Good Shit are kind of working at one of the symptoms rather than the cause; seratonin & dopamine etc are low in yer synapses when you’re depressed because of something else. raising those levels can have the knock-on effect of making it easier to do things and thus unfuck a little more but it doesn’t always work because we don’t yet have the whole of the picture, read the last chapter for a more coherent overview. [my memory is spam in a can since the anaesthetic so i apologise for garbled recollection]
2. how your brain does the Thing, any Thing, is to swoosh the electrics down the noodles and send a bunch of little keys around the immediate area. anything with the appropriate lock goes “ah, incoming”, and swooshes more power along in Directions. Our noodles get better at this the more we use them that way. They can be stimulated with drugs (MORE KEYS FOR EVERYONE), told to shut up with drugs (LESS OF THIS KEY), or encouraged into swooshing noodles via other stimulus (which is why exercise helps some people, or CBT helps some people, or prayer is more likely to help people who have a predisposition to religiosity). The noodles are reluctant and need help to swoosh, and sometimes yer keys or locks are on strike, or everyone’s a bit rusty, or someone left open the thing that makes the keys that fit the “feel like wank” locks come out.
basically, it’s all chemical, it’s just that sometimes the most effective way to get the chemistry working more equitably is “push lever, create neurotransmitter, repeat until habit is formed” rather than “repeatedly create neurotransmitter without push lever”. human bodies & brains are wildly complicated & tbh it’s a testament to quite a lot of selective pressure that they’ve got to this level of non-frequent upfuckery. i’m pretty sure if i tried to make a thing that did all the stuff a brain does using proteins & flinging electrons about it would get as far as trying to inhale once and them promptly break.
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