Submitted by erikthered in MentalWellbeing

I've seen people talk about how the right medications can change your life for the better if you have a mental illness. They compare their condition to diabetes and talk about how their brains do not produce enough serotonin so they have to take antidepressants to boost the serotonin in their brains like how a diabetic has to take insulin. But I've never really been able to buy into this idea that it's all just a chemical imbalance in the brain.

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tuesday wrote

it was a line sold by big pharma to sell Prozac in the 90s or something.

the answer to why people have mental illness according to psychology as a field is that it's a mix of physical, psychological, and social factors.

that being said I've been depressed for my whole life but I just found an antidepressant that seems to be doing ok things with my brain and like I'm not happy or anything but I'm not nearly as sad as I usually am and that's helping me to function a little more.

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moonlune wrote

If you mind sharing, how does "depression" sad compare to "regular" sad?

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tuesday wrote (edited )

I don't know how to answer that because I've never not been depressed.

My depression manifests in an sadness that makes it very difficult to do things to take care of myself. At my worst I spent two years in bed, just rotting in a room piled with trash and filthy clothes, only showering once a month or so, wearing the same clothes for days and weeks because it was too hard to even change out of them. Cooking was impossible, as was cleaning up after so I ate a lot of packaged junk, the packaging of which was just thrown onto the floor because it was too much effort to leave my room to throw it out. I lost my job pretty early on in that, so I also got evicted and then moved back into my parents house. I was hoping they would help me do something, but they didn't. I think the only reason I didn't unlife was this deep and abiding belief that I deserved to be that wretched and because then no one would feed my dog.

Even now that I'm "functional" I still spend an inordinate amount of time in bed not really engaging or interacting with anything or anyone in a sort of hazy buzz of disassociation and low moods.

Let's imagine that there's a scale of human happiness/sadness that goes from 1 to 10. 1 is the worst day of your life. 10, the best. When I was unmedicated I lived at about a 3. When I was rotting away for 2 years I was at like a 2. now I'm maybe at a 4, 4.5 most of the time. I can get a 5, which is sort of not sad but not happy either, and sometimes I can hit a 6 now, which was incredibly rare before.

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Fool wrote

No... But extra chemicals can help for some people.

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catachresis wrote

CPTSD would describe like 75% of the DSM5 if it was added. CPTSD comes, generally, from trauma in formative years while brains are malleable and forming many new connections. Down the road I think these trauma connections can create chemical imbalances in the brain. Chemical imbalances in the gut and imbalances of hormones can also effect mental health significantly.

Drugs certainly help people, but the same drugs that are aiming to fix imbalances could be creating imbalances in another direction. I’m of the opinion that community, nutrition, and exercise can help dramatically but is inaccessible for so many people due to the pressures of capitalism it can be nearly impossible to heal.

So I guess scientifically it is chemical imbalances but there are other ways of finding balance without pharmaceuticals. That said my depression has been fairly manageable and have no experience with anti-depressants, besides friends telling me their experiences. I find it important to remember that self-care is the most radical act we can do.

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zephyr wrote

just my opinion: if drugs (chemicals) improve the problem it would seem that a chemical imbalance is the immediate cause. but that imbalance could be genetic in origin or a result of life experiences (psychological in origin). bipolar disorder and schizophrenia seem to have a genetic heritable origin while most depression may be more a result of life experiences.

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