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Comment by heimatau | Hacker News Reader

> "I'm feeling blue today, my serotonin must be low," etc. This drives me crazy. It's pure pseudoscience,

Yeah. I think it's a pseudoscience too. Even though 5HTP and St. John's Wort produce a 'happy feeling' to me and many others. It doesn't last. Even with modern day SSRIs and other depression meds, pill holidays are recommended. Pill holidays shows me that they are an imperfect solution. I would tell a person in a wheelchair to 'try and walk it off' for a few days/weeks. That's unfair to their illness, yet psych does that with their meds.

> but the reality is way more complex and nuanced.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Hopefully, we'll have a medical breakthrough in psych in the next 20 years. With all the investment, I'm optimistic.

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You need to be careful with the pill holiday thing. When I was taking venlafaxine, the withdrawl happened very fast and was miserable... if I missed two days I was in trouble.

My "discontinuation syndrome" was coming off desvenlafaxine. My access to it was suddenly taken away so I had no choice but to sit through the brain zaps for probably a week or two. You can't be sure how long it's going to last and that shit is as unpleasant as it gets.

This is why you need to taper off the drugs over 4 weeks. If it takes 4 weeks to start working, it makes sense it should take your brain the same amount of time to work properly without them.

Coming off venlafaxine is considerably more unpleasant than going on venlafaxine, even with correct titration up and down.

Even with tapering I get severe sides from ssri/ssri drugs.

If I had had the choice I would have tapered, but I had an adverse reaction to it and it wasn't handled very well.

The reason it doesn't last is that you're building a tolerance. Your brain tries to adapt so that it can bring you back to "baseline". If such mechanisms weren't in place, then a change in diet could have a massive impact on our moods and mental stability.

I agree; this article is a little misleading. Any substance that rapidly releases serotonin will definitely make you feel happy, if you're not already tolerant.

It's obviously more complex than just being "the happy neurotransmitter", but it is tied to general mood.

It is tied to mood, the reason it's more complicated though is that there are many clusters of neuron in the brain which use serotonin to communicate. There are 14 known serotonin receptor subtypes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT_receptor#Subtypes). Psychedelic drugs (mushrooms, LSD, etc) typically act on 5-HT2a receptors. Serotonin is involved in perceptual filtering, hence why fractal patterns and hallucinations can occur when 5-HT2a is triggered.

I would actually say that there's a more obvious link between dopamine and mood than serotonin. Dopamine releasers (amphetamines, meth, ritalin, cocaine) produce an immediate uplifting and confidence-boosting effect. MDMA doesn't just release serotonin, it also releases dopamine. The serotonin release from MDMA is responsible for its powerful anti-anxiety effect. It's believed that the "loved up" feeling from that drug is due to an indirect action of serotonin which eventually produce oxytocin release.

I don't know if you mean daily dietary changes but I feel very different mentally when on a strict keto diet.

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