Seretonin's Blog
SEROTONIN
January 13, 2009Your mind... My actions
With quasi-religious devoutness, Jess avoids, every crack on the sidewalk, lest she "breaks her mother's back." Just six years old, she is already a captive to frightening obsessions, a slave to ritualistic compulsions.
Like his father before him, Jack was a teenager when he too to drink and began his slide into mischief, violence, and depression, Tonight---unemployed, desperate, drunk---he takes a rifle to his wife and children, then to himself.
Every day, Laura has a new ache, a new pain. They keep her awake at night. They fuel her chronic fatigue and depression. Her doctors say it's all in her head---and it may be.
A massive body research suggests theses people have at least one thing in common: a deficiency or defect in the behavior of an important messenger molecule in their brains, a neurotransmitter called SEROTONIN.
Of the dozens of neurochemicals that help mediate the complex comings and goings of our minds and behaviors, possibly none has come in for so much scrutiny as serotonin. It has a finger in almost every neurobehavioral pie: aggression, appetite, impulse control, mood, pain, sleep, sociability, and more. Disturbances in the way brain cells called neurons use serotonin to signal other neurons---typically, deficiencies of "serotonergic" (serotonin mediated) activity---are providing to be a common denominator among a remarkably broad range of neuropsychiatric disorders. And drugs which boost serotonin---like the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft---are providing to be the most versatile agents in the psychiatrist's little black bag