How Antidepressants Work

This is something I seldom do, get into the whole chemical and scientific part of psychology.  Most of the time I am so blown away by something else that I pay little attention to what’s happening at the synapses of the brain.  This is interesting because you can’t just say A causes B.  It’s a lot more complex.  We usually use anti-depressants to increase the presence of serotonin or other neurotransmitters at the synapse.  Just because we need more serotonin at the synapse doesn’t mean that the brain is not producing enough of it.  People with depression actually produce normal amounts of serotonin, sometimes even more!  Studies have shown that decreasing serotonin does not make one feel depressed.   So there has to be more to it.

 

I think the theory about BDNF is pretty interesting.  By putting it plainly, I think that I would be depressed too if my hippocampus was smaller than normal.  The hippocampus is important for synaptic plasticity, learning, and proliferation of new neurons.  BDNF (Brain derived neurotrophic factor) helps by facilitating new learnin gthath builds new synapses and removes many old ones.  It seems that learning and reporudction of new cells in such an important area of the brain is important, if not essential.