I’m not an expert in the field, but I am someone who has recovered from depression. The “lack of serotonin” theory always made me laugh. It’s like if your computer was running abnormally and you said it “doesn’t have enough electricity”.
Neurotransmitters send signals. The amount of neurotransmitter tells you nothing about what information is actually encoded in those signals. You can transmit happy and sad music using electricity, for example. It seems to me that you can transmit happy and sad thoughts using neurotransmitters. (And of course the brain is much more complicated than a computer, because a computer “just” uses electricity, whereas in the brain some processing happens at each neuron, and signals coming in on one neurotransmitter can cause signals to leave in others.)
I see the term antidepressant as a bit of a misnomer. A drug that inhibits re-uptake of neurotransmitters will amplify the “loudness” of the signals. If you only have negative thoughts, and you take such a drug, your depression could realistically get worse (and this does happen to some people).
If you can get in to a positive feedback loop (e.g. an activity that leads to positive thoughts that lead to more of that activity) and _then_ start amplifying those signals, then these drugs can do wonders.
>The “lack of serotonin” theory always made me laugh. It’s like if your computer was running abnormally and you said it “doesn’t have enough electricity”.
A computer is a digital device, so it's more like all or nothing. It either powers up or not.
Analog electrical devices however can indeed behave suboptimally without enough electricity.
Digital devices can absolutely intermittently function if voltages are outside a stable range in certain places. The point was that if you encounter frequent abnormal errors with your computer, you rarely begin with boosting every one of the DRAM, core, and other miscellaneous voltages.
Its fundamentally an analog device. The concept of information being a 0 or 1 are simply one voltage level offset from one another. Its how we project the digital 'view' onto the computer and work with it. If the signal is not in the expected range of '0' and not in the expected range of '1' it should throw a hardware error and you'll end up with a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) or equivalent.
We feed it alternating current to start with. It can partially power up, the only reason it appears to be working or not is because of all the safeguards designed in - don't power up unless voltage is at least blah, and failsafe cutout refuse to power up because voltage is over say blah*1.05. There's a subset of expect Voltage ranges (eg. 3.3V)[1].
It's literally the first thing the computer does. POST - Power On, Self Test.
When a power supply gets old, wonky things start happening and the computer becomes unstable in weird ways. I am not sure the computer/power metaphors are the best fit.
If the issue were biological lack of electricity, why would childhood trauma be linked to it? And why would it be curable through therapy?
It seems to me like saying, I started a fire that burned my house down, but the real cause of the house burning down was too much heat in the house. It’s both true and unhelpful.
Speaking personally, depression is more about the ability to manage emotions rather than the emotion themselves. In other words, remembering something that happened in the past that would cause a tiny bit of embarrassment in a "normal" condition would be unbearably painful under depression.
Therapy is useful both in recognizing when your emotional response is disproportional compared to the cause (that is, being "properly" sad or embarrassed vs being depressed), snap out of it and to "learn" to avoid being embarrassed or sad for things outside of your control that could trigger your depression, for example. Something along the same lines of the "there's no spoon" quote from the matrix, but applied to your emotions.
Speaking from my own personal experience, telling myself that the specific facts at hand were irrelevant was very tempting and totally wrong. It had everything to do, for me, with the details of the emotion and the situation, and critically what it was linked to in my history. I suspect that’s true for everyone, but I couldn’t come close to proving it.
>If the issue were biological lack of electricity, why would childhood trauma be linked to it? And why would it be curable through therapy?
Regardless if the serotonine theory of depression is real or not, something having a biological substrate doesn't mean its hardwired or only kickstarted by biological factors.
Levels of hormones, neurotransmitters, and other substances can drop due to many factors, including diet, exercize, sun exposure, vitamin uptake, issues with insulin, thyroid, and so on, but also "psychological" things like trauma response, stress, continued fight or flight mode, etc.
I know both about both (undervolting and circuitbending, the latter in the context of electronic music gear).
Undervolting doesn't change what I wrote though: the computer will still do what it does as before (with less heat). The PC either gets enough power to power up or not - it's a (pun intended) binary thing.
It's not like it's behavior will change and the OS/apps will do something different because of undervolting.
>If you can get in to a positive feedback loop (e.g. an activity that leads to positive thoughts that lead to more of that activity) and _then_ start amplifying those signals, then these drugs can do wonders.
this is how alcohol works on me and why I never drink if I'm not in a good mood. But I'd be careful about generalizing what effects drugs have on people.
Harking back to neurons compsci: neurotransmitters can modulate by their amount transmitted (saturation of the receptors, or not), so I can imagine if there's just not enough around, that certain signals will not (optimally) be transmitted.
Neurotransmitters send signals. The amount of neurotransmitter tells you nothing about what information is actually encoded in those signals. You can transmit happy and sad music using electricity, for example. It seems to me that you can transmit happy and sad thoughts using neurotransmitters. (And of course the brain is much more complicated than a computer, because a computer “just” uses electricity, whereas in the brain some processing happens at each neuron, and signals coming in on one neurotransmitter can cause signals to leave in others.)
I see the term antidepressant as a bit of a misnomer. A drug that inhibits re-uptake of neurotransmitters will amplify the “loudness” of the signals. If you only have negative thoughts, and you take such a drug, your depression could realistically get worse (and this does happen to some people).
If you can get in to a positive feedback loop (e.g. an activity that leads to positive thoughts that lead to more of that activity) and _then_ start amplifying those signals, then these drugs can do wonders.