Chemistry of Depression

I am no doctor, but I believe that mental illness is something that is important and should be talked about. There are way too many stigmatisms behind people who are simply sick, and ignorance is the reason people do not know. I lost someone close to me to depression and people still to this day ask me, “why did she end her life”. Every single time I want to respond with, “Would you ever ask someone who died of cancer why they died.” No, you wouldn’t. To me, illness is an illness, mental or physical.

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Neurotransmitters, in simple terms, are chemical messengers that are in everyone's brains, that communicate everything that is going on in your brain to your body. Neurotransmitters regulate everything and anything you can think of that goes on in your body, including your mood. The three main neurotransmitters relating to mood regulation are neopterin, dopamine, and serotonin, the famous “feel good” transmitter. Research shows that people that struggle with depression have low levels of these specific neurotransmitters in their brain. Yes, there are specific risk factors that cause this, and reasons, but the people who struggle from depression cannot help it. It is a medical condition that you choose to have or not.

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There are a lot of reasons why low levels of these transmitters occur. One being, the brain simply does not produce as many neurotransmitters, such a serotonin. Another reason could be the brain does not have enough receptors to accept these signals. If particular molecules are in short supply that fabricates the neurotransmitter, such as enzymes needed, there will be low levels of that neurotransmitter. There are a couple different reasons that get into presynaptic activity, but I do not think I have enough background to describe those events.

Since depression is an illness, doctors have medicines they can prescribe to help the patient suffering. The most popular medicine to treat people is called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s), and they focus solely on the serotonin molecule. A newer drug called serotonin-neopterin reuptake inhibitors (SNRI’s), but they have found more side effects in this drug that they did not have in other drugs. Many other drugs exist in treating depression, but medicine is not always the best thing for a patient.

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Although these drugs have a high rate of helping patients, there is a lot more to mental illness than chemistry, although I wish it was a simple problem with an equally as simple solution. This particular article says it perfectly, “healing depression, unlike giving an insulin shot to someone with diabetes, is much more complex and intricate.” Some people do not respond well to taking these drugs, that can all be categorized as anti-depressants. All of this depends on how the depression initiated, and that answer can be a range of anything from genetics to early childhood experiences.

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We are not all chemists who can understand the intricate workings of the human mind, but we are all humans, and we should all treat each other as such. You can never know who is going on in someone else's mind, but I challenge you, and I challenge my self every day, to treat everyone well.

The national suicide hotline. Click on the picture, inform yourself, and save a life.