Serotonin selectively influences moral judgment and behavior
pnas.org
pnas.org
I will be extremely hesitant to take antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications ever again after my last experience with them. For me, the medications helped by tempering all of my feelings - I no longer felt sad or anxious, instead I just felt mellow and apathetic about everything. And feeling apathy is an incredibly scary thing because I also no longer derived any joy from my hobbies, from sex, from exercise, etc. I could no longer feel sad but I could no longer feel happy, either.
Even worse, I found myself engaging in behaviors I would never have engaged in otherwise, like compulsive lying. My moral code was compromised because I no longer felt the guilt and shame that normally inhibits unscrupulous behavior. I look back on that time now and I think about some of my actions and I feel nauseous.
There is value to medications that inhibit or regulate serotonin, and every individual's experience will be slightly different based on their genetics and the circumstances of their life. However, for me, even though I benefited from them at various points in my life (especially as a teenager), as an adult now I'm much more likely to depend on coping strategies I've learned through therapy than medication when it comes to dealing with my mood.
They often accompany one another. I've had panic attacks in the past, and was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I can't claim that bupropion fixes panic attacks proper, and I'm not a doctor, but it does help me with my depression. (I haven't had a panic attack in a long time.)
It's not a silver bullet; you can still find yourself in mentally stuck states, the difference is the physical side of things seems to be 'gated' at the low end so that your spiraling down isn't as deep as it is before. There's still a lot of work to do to recognize + slow that descent, but it is a tool to help with that.
Wellbutrin and NDRIs typically aren't that great for anxiety, but they can help.
I've never heard of that. Why would they be testing an infant for their reaction to an antidepressant drug? Just curious.
I would have hoped clinicians would start at the lowest possible dose, and titrate up. I've certainly heard of the "you need about xx mg, use this dose" first doses, tho.
To me, this is Yet Another reason one should never receive medical advice alone, especially when thinking is impaired. That trusted friend / partner needs to ask the hard questions of the prescribing clinician; but rules make any 3rd party except spouse difficult for adults.
Acute drug experiences with therapy and behavioral modification are the future.
do some molly and ketamine and have a good talk.
Note that while the evidence for Ketamine's antidepressant effect is actually strong, that does not mean you should get into the habit of snorting a gram of special K a day.
Ketamine abuse is known to cause serious, practical damage to the GI tract, the urinary system, the liver, and the brain.
What does it do and why is that helpful?
Experimentally, it works. There are theories (google will give you a couple vaguely plausible mechanisms), but it's too early to say. And it's likely that the antidepressive effect of ketamine has nothing to do with its NMDA antagonism, given that other NMDA receptor antagonists do not work as antidepressives.
Neuroscience theory lags far behind applied psychiatry, so all know is people whose depression resists normal treatment now have another very promising option, with a very different mechanism from normal antidepression treatment.
Mechanisms of action are difficult to be objective about. It is a lot more complicated than dopamine and serotonin regulation and uptake, receptors and antagonists.
Today was pleasant, despite every reason not to be. It's like the "hope" qualia.
Also TIL “qualia” - what a wonderful word.
Not just slightly different. It can be extremely variable from person to person.
It’s well-known in medical research and clinical practice that medications likes SSRIs range from helpful to neutral to net negatives depending on the patients and situation. Sadly, too many people fixate on the potential negative side effects and avoid trialing treatments altogether.
For anyone suffering: It’s true that medications might not work out for you, but if they do address your condition and you’re one of the many people whose lives benefit greatly, then it would be tragic to avoid medications based on fear of potential negative outcomes.
Not just SSRIs. I had a very bad experience with Mucinex D (or DM?) about 12 years ago, the first time I tried it. I can only imagine it was what clinical depression is like. For two days (until I stopped taking because I was so scared) I lost all interest in my life. I wasn't interested in my young children, ow my wife, or watching anything on TV I usually like, or playing a game. I was questioning my work life choices as well because nothing at work held the slightest interest. I would go home, do what was required of me, then sit in bed and stare at the wall until I went to bed.
That is, to this day, one of the scariest experiences in my life. I've since heard of one or two other people that had similar experiences with it.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dextromethorphan see section on dependence and withdrawal
It’s not interchangeable with SSRIs, obviously.
IMO, the fear is not really about short-term negatives, but about it turning into drug abuse, without actually tackling the root cause.
Such drugs should only be used in extreme cases.
For example, adverse childhood experiences are highly correlated with depression. What's the underlying problem to tackle with a 50 year old adult who is depressed as a result of abuse as a child? Some things just change you and no amount of therapy can undo that
In my opinion, SSRIs should only be used as a tool to help make the patient more receptive to therapy.
It should never ever be used a substitute for therapy. I too have noticed that without someone to help keeping your behaviour in check, some undesirable (but not necessarily dark) personality traits could take over. Not to mention that someone needs to be there to check on you during the first weeks of use when the drug actually causes a deeper depression before it starts mellowing your feelings.
BTW. My second SSRI use also left me with permanently dry eyes and nose: me needing eye drops and to avoid dusty, dry environments for the rest of my life.
The only reason I'm still alive is due to SSRIs, they have definitely taken away some of the highs of life but they also took away the incessant thoughts of suicide. They have side effects. They suck and the idea of being physically and mentally addicted to a mood stabilizer is a huge bummer. But I know that the people around me (and you) want us around, even if it's not 100 percent of who we really are. If your meds are working for you, messing around with them because you want to "hack" your brain isn't necessarily the best course of action. Be smart.
Whatever that treatment might be.
Side comment: doing a PhD in a foreign country is no joke. First rule of doing a PhD is: don't do a PhD.
MAPS.org did clinical trials, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for veterans with treatment resistant PTSD, to great success.
I am enthusiastic about the advancement of research in this area and frustrated that it was delayed for so long due to political reasons, but please keep in mind that people with mood disorders or trauma can be desperate and may not make the best choices for themselves on their own.
Your final sentence also rings true for any remedy including SSRIs which many people have been harmed by, likewise your pointing out to this research not advancing due to political reasons - including system and regulatory capture - can be applied to existing treatments that were approved but perhaps should not have been; the conspiracy hypothesis that's becoming mainstream is that things like MDMA, psychedelics et al, were suppressed by for-profit industrial complexes via "the war on drugs" because pharma's patented daily-use recurring business model products couldn't compete with the very cheap to make, administer "2-3 times per year" chemicals that don't have anything close to the same "side" effect profile.
You can see how this regulatory capture still has a hold in Canada for the alcohol industry, where alcohol's a known carcinogen, and as a society we put warnings on tobacco products but no such warnings on alcohol - and this isn't the only incongruence in Canadian policy/culture.
SSRIs aren’t the only promising solution.
> SSRIs aren’t the only promising solution.
I don't think it's very helpful to vaguely bring up "supplements" like that. There are so many, and they range from being harmful, to being placebos, to being actually helpful. Plus there's a huge amount of utter quackery around them.
Do you have any specific "promising" ones in mind?
It's like zero thought has been put into quality of life by practitioners, so long as their metrics are met
E.g. "x, y, z attributes on the ABC scale went down. Looks like you're in remission!"
"But doctor, my dick doesn't work, I've gained 40lbs, and everything feels flat."
"We can prescribe a stimulant for appetite suppression, a vasodilator for the libido... but the 'flat' is all in your head. I'm going to write you a recommendation to a psychologist so they can talk to you about it."
Absolute ninnies.
I understand what you mean about engaging in out-of-personality behaviors, lack of moral code, and the nausea and panic that accompanies the memories of "who you were" on a certain medication (they do go away, with time. And they lose their emotional impact once you accept that it was due to medication, and rationalize it away). They warn you that there might be personality changes, and you'll feel different, but I don't think they understand the absolute gravity of what that means. Even pharmacists go on their soapbox every time you ask for a different brand (because X brand doesn't feel the same, and the FDA has issued numerous warnings about quality control): "the only thing different about brand name medication is the marketing. They're all bio-equivalent and it's all in your head." Fuck off.
This isn't even addressing that it's likely most of the "anti-depressive" effect is placebo in SSRIs and the like. "Oh I feel very different now from this medication. That means it's strong, and effective, and I should be getting better now"; it's in the same vein as chiropractic, except with more woo-woo and theatre ("modern medicine!!!").
There are better substances that can be used off-label/aren't "copyrighted" that actually solve emotional issues by (properly) regulating neurotransmitters and genomic expression to achieve pro-humanist results, instead of soulless pro-metrics and "quantitative" results. But they're not being marketed, because the current batch of psychoactive chemicals is riding on decades of marketing and "works" (see: generates outsized profits).
In my opinion, almost all of these have been a net-negative on society. Opiates, benzos, "anti-psychotics," "anti-depressives," and the like: they're all shit.
There are better chemical (and lifestyle solutions) to these problems, but right now the medical complex has a hard-fought monopoly on health treatment; so anything that would usurp power from them is a no-no (a la "fuck pro-consumer, I'm getting mine").
Most people's androgen:estrogen balance (and levels) are absolutely off kilter, if they live a modern life (no exercise/only exercise is the gym, lack of sunlight, sitting down all day, living in a city, braindead birth control protocols with only estrogens, etc.).
Tuning that would be the most beneficial. And it would get to the root of the problem viz. fixing a mismatched upregulation/downregulate of neurotransmitter receptors (f.e. increasing sensitivity of GABA receptors, decreasing sensitivity of noradrenaline receptors, and so on) -- instead of just a simple and stupid "hur dur lets flood the synaptic cleft with serotonin/dopamine/catecholamines."
Barring that, there exist others that do not disrupt one's natural HPTA, and are more "targeted" towards neurons, rather than the whole body.
Peptides:
There are an assortment of peptides, but their main uses are specifically in gene expression/and cell signal tuning. They're hit or miss. A lot of woo-woo shit going on, and many people hype them up as a cure-all (because there's money to be made); when that's taken into account (and the lack of extensive research), you'll find an assortment of chemicals to play around with.
Russian synthetic adaptogens:
These are their own category of "adaptogens" popular in the Russian medical community (and seeing Western adoption). E.g. semax, bromantane, selank etc. They act as hormones/signaling molecules by changing the expressions of genes (leading to downstream changes of natural peptide levels, behavior of psychological/catecholamine systems, and so on).
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All of these, in my opinion and experience, are leagues better than the garbage that is peddled by the U.S's medical community -- because this actually changes shit on the genomic level, rather than fucking with the physical processes outright (ex. imagine the difference between cloud seeding to get more rainfall vs. diverting rivers, to fill aquifers. One of these is much more sustainable and has less side-effects).
Hope I am not out of bond but I think this demonstrates why a moral code also has to be an intellectual thing and not just an instinct thing.
Tangentially related - I had the experience - from being in a depression - of empathizing more with people down on their luck, people who are chronically grumpy or unlikable etc, or maybe those that are afraid of unknown people. I'm not sure how to explain it, but it made me see different sides of the human experience and I got out alive.
Is morality "entirely subjective"? When someone says, "Torturing children is immoral", do you really want to reply "That's entirely subjective". The very reply itself seems morally compromised, even immoral.
A good philosophical argument for the objectivity of morality is the "companions in the guilt" argument. Most people accept the objectivity of rationality, even those who deny the objectivity of morality. And yet, when we examine the two in detail, we can find a great many similarities between rationality and morality – morality says "don't do X", where X might be torturing a child, rationality says "don't believe X", where X might be the QAnon conspiracy theory; morality values states of affairs positively or negatively (moral vs immoral), rationality does the same (rational vs irrational) – in light of these similarities, how is it not special pleading to affirm the objectivity of one yet deny it of the other? To justify treating them differently, you'd need to give a good reason for doing so – but rarely is any reason given at all, and I don't think any of them are good. Rationally, we must either affirm the objectivity of morality or deny the objectivity of rationality. I think, to affirm the objectivity of morality is the better horn to take – we might even conclude it is the more rational one, if we believe that rationality itself requires belief in its own rationality. Hence, morality is objective.
That was meant to be "if we believe that rationality itself requires belief in its own objectivity". Thought one word typed another.
This, regardless of how you feel about the subject matter, is a factually false statement. That's not how instincts work, or what they are. Additionally, even without that error, the statement holds false.
How do they work? What are they then?
> Additionally, even without that error, the statement holds false.
How? Why?
Within the first 10 minutes he speaks of the fact that rational thought as we see it simply does not exist. All our choices are based on the ability to distinguish a preference and that ability is based on emotion.
It would only make sense that medication impairing our emotions would also impair our choice making.
In general, I've found this idea was quite natural to me, but always seems quite foreign to others except those with a background in neurology, meditation, sometimes physics, and Buddhist circles.
People seem especially hostile to this when you start talking about the criminal justice system.
However, if you take the same people and (at some other point in time) change the topic of conversation to some object level issue, they then behave as if they have no knowledge whatsoever. And if you remind them, it isn't just that they get angry (as would be expected), but they seem literally unable to recall the knowledge that they do possess.
I genuinely believe that to some degree, the default human mind can't really multi-task abstract and object level thinking, so if you throw a bit of emotion and cognitive quirks [1] into the mix, add it all together [2] into one big system, you have a half decent model for explaining why the world is the way it is.
I'm leaving a ton of stuff out of course, but this is one of the more fundamental ideas in my hypothesis.
> In general, I've found this idea was quite natural to me, but always seems quite foreign to others except those with a background in neurology, meditation, sometimes physics, and Buddhist circles.
Agree....I truly think its possible that things like Buddhism are an important aspect: if a person can't "get" Buddhism (or can't take it seriously), I suspect they will also not be able to properly understand this topic.
> People seem especially hostile to this when you start talking about the criminal justice system.
Oh, can you expand on this?
The belief that we are rational beings making informed calculated decisions is outdated and proven to be wrong.
Yet, we continue to think of ourselves this way, at our peril.
What helped me was switching away from a first-line SSRI and onto something a bit more niche: Mirtazapine. It's definitely worth trying a variety of SSRIs because everyone is different and it's really common for the first one or two that you try to not work well.
I agree that ultimately therapy/coping strategies are the right cure, medicine is a way to bootstrap otherwise incapable people into persuing exercise, therapy, social stuff etc. If you can achieve that without the help of meds, more power to you!
If you take it before bedtime, it sedates you in a deep sleep. But 3-4 hours later, if you wake up, it would be like you didn’t take anything.
You may even have trouble going back to sleep if you wake up early.
Of course all this varies greatly for every individual.
The symptoms you explain are why it is important to pair therapy with antidepressents.
I'm very surprised your therapist did not alter your scrip.
I'm not saying medication is not effective - it was extremely effective for me in different phases of my life and probably saved me from suicide, however in my adult life I found the emotional blunting and apathy that came with not just SSRIs but DSRIs and other classes of medications to be extremely concerning.
The entire mental health industry is focused on extracting as much from vulnerable people as possible. Unless you have a spare 1200$ to 1600$ a month laying around you won't be able to afford therapy anyway...
I'd wonder why everything felt so hard for me, why I was so stressed out all the time. And how it could be that no one else seemed to be horrified by the existential realities of life. At the same time I wanted to participate in life so I could help change things for the better-- but damn every morning was a new battle. And then I decided to start the same medication again, and boom.
About a year later and I feel normal. It's amazing. I'm like.. is this how people feel all the time? You guys just wake up and don't dread the day? Lol it's almost funny now. They blunt my emotions.. but turns out i was hyper sensitive to everything. In an awful , stressful way. I still have white hair from that period of life.
Sometimes, medication is the answer. I had a perfectly fine life on paper yet couldn't be happy. My theory is this was because of some adverse childhood events I experienced, that seemed to change something in me. Thank God for modern medicine.
And I learned sometimes the best advice is don't listen to others-- only you know what's best for you. People are complicated and therapy doesn't always work.
Have you considered some sort of regression therapy such as hypnotherapy or if more adventurous, plant medicine? I sat next to a pretty senior FBI guy on a domestic US flight once. He was a hypnotherapist who claimed that in almost all cases they were able to use hypnosis to get information about what happened even if the conscious person was completely unable to recall any details.
In most shamanic traditions, a lot of work is devoted to bringing up and purging out past trauma. Examples include plant vapor baths to sweat things out, purgatives to release emotional trauma (often present in the stomach / belly) and plant medicines such as ayahuasca that act as both a purgative and help form new perspectives of past experiences.
There's no guarantee that the information they received was true. I imagine hypnosis is in the same category as lie detectors with respect to its...interpretability.
I appreciate many think it's snake oil, I did too years ago. But have seen first hand great results.
You certainly can get memories back this way; the problem is that they'll be fabricated, especially from childhood.
I agree both these kinds of therapy are effective though.
FBI still works with hypnotherapists.
I find those ideas intriguing in their own ways, but I'm not sure if they'd help in my situation.
In the 80s we had Satanic Panic because of false memories "retrieved" with hypnotherapy. It turned out that the "memories" were implanted unknowingly by the hypnotherapists themselves.
I’m not anti-medication by any means. I will probably need medication to feel OK for the rest of my life, but EMDR has augmented my treatment in a meaningful way. If you haven’t tried it, it’s at least worth looking into.
For some folks this is actually roughly the ailment that they suffer from:
> Anhedonia is a diverse array of deficits in hedonic function, including reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure.[1] While earlier definitions emphasized the inability to experience pleasure, anhedonia is currently used by researchers to refer to reduced motivation, reduced anticipatory pleasure (wanting), reduced consummatory pleasure (liking), and deficits in reinforcement learning.[2][3][4]
The reality is, SSRIs and other pharmaceuticals that have been used to treat common psychiatric illnesses (anxiety/depression) have dismal outcomes and fail the vast majority of patients that they have been given to.
Fortunately, there is a growing body of evidence that MDMA and psychedelic assisted therapy could revolutionize the treatment of mental health disorders.
Unfortunately, for the last 50 years, governments, industry and the military industrial complex (together with the MSM) have spread lies and scaremongering to block the therapeutic use of these life-changing therapies.
Here is another video for anyone wanting to know more about the topic:
(Lecture by Prof. David Nutt: The New Psychedelic Revolution)
I'm optimistic that the next few decades will bring about better approaches to these massively underserved (and largely exploited and discarded) people.
References: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01336-3
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09540261.2021.1...
I have taken other SSRIs before, but it is puzzling how each one has its own particular behavioral effects even though they all are increasing serotonin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser#Scientific_miscond...
This article was published in 2010, he had to resign his faculty position at Harvard in 2011, and was found guilty of scientific misconduct in 2012 by the government Office of Research Integrity.
Yeah, not the sexy kind of misconduct.
There is something like Serotonin Irritation Syndrome which can cause aggressive feelings and thoughts. Personally I tried to increase my serotonin twice, once with Tryptophan a few years ago and recently with Inositol. Both times I felt very aggressive. Maybe I should use it right before a chess game, who knows it helps ;)
It is sometimes mentioned that for people who are sensitive to psychosis (like me) this can be a tipping point towards aggressive behaviour.
There are secondary effects as well, for example, women have been shown to select for more dominant, aggressive men when fertile and meeker providers when not - how might that shape our social landscape, if a sizable proportion of women are kept permanently in a hormonally induced infertile state?
0. https://magazine.tcu.edu/fall-2020/hormonal-birth-control-br...
If scientists had a camera and microphone in every room on earth (which is of course impossible) they would learn a lot more about humans than they would with studies in artificial lab environments where they have to guess if the results have any applicability to real human behavior in real human environments.
Your second link lists only St. Anthony Family Practice Residency Program as an affiliation.
I can't say one way or the other whether your assertions are valid. But your choice of sources warrants caution.
"The medications that change who we are"
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200108-the-medications-...
> They’ve been linked to road rage, pathological gambling, and complicated acts of fraud. Some make us less neurotic, and others may even shape our social relationships. It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains. Why? And should there be warnings on packets?
> We’re all familiar with the mind-bending properties of psychedelic drugs – but it turns out ordinary medications can be just as potent. From paracetamol (known as acetaminophen in the US) to antihistamines, statins, asthma medications and antidepressants, there’s emerging evidence that they can make us impulsive, angry, or restless, diminish our empathy for strangers, and even manipulate fundamental aspects of our personalities, such as how neurotic we are.
> If these claims are true, the implications are profound. The list of potential culprits includes some of the most widely consumed drugs on the planet, meaning that even if the effects are small at an individual level, they could be shaping the personalities of millions of people.
Regardless, justice systems (incentives and accountability) and incarceration (incentives, and ideally rehabilitation) have nothing to do with free will. Any connection between free will (presence or absence) and the justice system seems to stems from some weird idea that it is about “punishing bad guys” or balancing some cosmic ledger. It is not. It is about controlling people just enough to ensure the long-term maintenance of society, as imperfect as our current implementation is. Look up Restorative Justice for approaches that focus on restorative outcomes for all involved, eschewing punishment and eye-for-eye thinking.
The cancerous cell does not carry any moral value; and neither does the immune system that destroys it. The cell infected by a virus is a victim of its circumstance, but that does not mean the immune system is should not destroy it.
If you accept a lack of free will, the solution does not need to immediately jump there but rather to finding a way that is fair to all to prevent the bad behavior thing from affecting others negatively while not locking someone up in a cage. There are many lines in between and some penal systems have adapted, but the US is way far behind there.
The optimization is no longer about revenge / punishment but about altering the scenario of the world to make everyone work together better. Sometimes people need to be fully separated from society, but not often. I think we do have effective behavior altering treatments, but they just aren't drugs and take time. But it's not a straight line from "it takes time to help people and its unreliable" to "we're giving up on finding a way for society to work with the people who did not choose what they are".
The question is if it's OK to adapt to the new landscape, or to consider it a crisis that needs to be solved.
The reality is, SSRIs and other pharmaceuticals that have been used to treat common psychiatric illnesses (anxiety/depression) have dismal outcomes and fail the vast majority of patients that they have been given to.
I'm optimistic that the next few decades will bring about better approaches to these massively underserved (and largely exploited and discarded) people.
It feels like I’m feeling emotions for the first time in my life. I had completely lost hope for any kind of improvement in my symptoms, until this. I am so, so thankful I found this, and am so glad that it will (most likely) be becoming legal for use in treatment outside clinical trials in the very near future. So many lives will change for the better. For the first time in a long time, I’m excited to wake up and ring in each new day.
Cheers, Will
Fortunately there is a growing body of evidence that MDMA and psychedelic assisted therapy could revolutionize the treatment of mental health disorders.
Unfortunately, for the last 50 years, governments, industry and the military industrial complex (together with the MSM) have spread lies and scaremongering to block the therapeutic use of these life-changing therapies.
Here is another video for anyone wanting to know more about the topic:
(Lecture by Prof. David Nutt: The New Psychedelic Revolution)
[1] https://books.google.pl/books?id=xhbFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT264&lpg=P...
"Together, these findings provide unique evidence that serotonin could promote prosocial behavior by enhancing harm aversion, "
I object to the notion that 'less harm' is necessarily 'pro social'.
You can see the emotional attachment to 'harm' which confirms my biases in that people have difficulty mapping the moral issues with harm against their emotional reaction.
Case and point: A man robs a bank, is running from police, shooting at them, the police shoot the man, he dies.
I believe the 'seratonin' response is to condemn the 'terrible harm' done by the police officers.
It takes second order rationalization to contextualize the situation.
So essentially a subject with enhanced serotonin was more likely to be exploited?
>Enhancing serotonin made subjects more likely to judge harmful actions as forbidden, but only in cases where harms were emotionally salient.
What does "emotionally salient" here mean?
It's saying that serotonin doesn't make you a better person or more fair in an objective sense, it just strengthens your feelings of empathy, which makes you a better person whenever the good and your feelings about it are by chance aligned.
The big question is ethics. How far do we go to understand, engineer, and change the very nature of what makes us human? Changing the very negative emotions for the future generation would change the world of great art like the next Poe, Van Gogh, Plath, and more.
This changes the very nature of what makes us unique. If everyone is happy, nobody is happy, right?
Medication has absolutely saved my life, and made my life and those around me significantly better. I'm triple vaxxed. Doctors recommended both. YMMV.
I don’t think that’s true. I think the sciences of psychiatry/psychology/neurology have several problems that are very unique that make them challenging fields. The literature is scientifically sound in methodology and data-analysis, but these challenges have the field progress slower, and have many false paths.
1. The brain is inherently complex. It might not be the most complex thing we study scientifically, but it’s complexity is a very big issue.
2. It’s really easy for the third-variable problem to have in impact in psychology/psychiatry. A classic example of this is the generalization problem. A study done in the US or France or another Western Democratic Educated country often will have findings that do not apply in Asia or African countries. Large swaths of the literature have questionable generalization, to the point this is often acknowledged inside the literature itself.
3. We have limited tools for studying these fields. The gold standard, the FMRI, requires people to be completely still and in a very artificial environment. This clearly will influence test results. This lack of tools is everywhere. We cannot directly measure happiness. We can ask people if they are happy. We can ask their friends and family if they seem happy. We can measure how much time they smile. If our sample size is large enough we can compare life outcomes like suicide. Every way we have to measure happiness has flaws, which makes drawing conclusions harder.
4. Ethics plays a huge role. We cannot, for example, randomly assign 100 children to play violent video games for 20 hours a week from age 10-18 and assign 100 children to never play these games. Thus any data we have about violent video games and children will not be as clean. We can assume that children that decide to play violent video games probably share other traits and would differ in a lot of ways to children that do not decide to play violent video games. Thus, it will be hard to determine if the violent video games had any impact, or if it was a third variable that many in the violent-video-games cluster share.
5. This happens everywhere, but this field especially is prone to journalists misreporting and misinterpreting the literature.
The evidence in favor of the mRNA-based COVID vaccines is overwhelmingly positive in terms of efficacy and lack of side effects. (Yes, they exist, but they are extremely rare) And neglecting to vaccinate one's self has serious risks for those around you, particularly at-risk folks. There aren't real alternatives, besides physically separating one's self from all human contact.
Psychiatric medicines are way, way, way more of a mixed bag. The side effects can be massive. The process of finding the correct one is very trial-and-error. For many people there are alternatives.
Please don't misunderstand: I know many who have massively benefitted from these meds. They can be positively transforming and lifesaving. I'm just questioning the value of comparing these two things.
There are many variables at play, I've only got my one data point to use.
This is subjective. Pro social just means that its beneficial for a social relationship(s)
Is this science?
In European woman, the most common bacteria in a woman's vagina's is Lactobacillus largely due to the milk product consumption in their die.
However whilst Western medicine considers Lactobacillus to be a probiotic, other cultures who do not consume milk products in as large a quantity have different bacterial profiles in their vagina's.
Japanese people claim to be able to smell gone off milk oozing from the pores of westerners.
The presence of a particular strain of bacteria (whose name I dont have to hand right now) in a woman's vagina will also predict whether they have freckles or not.
Biology is a fascinating subject and very much open to debate.
Humans are very good at detecting rancid milk from the smell; I believe nobody's developed a machine better than us yet.
Japanese people claim to be able to smell gone off milk
oozing from the pores of westerners.
I think I remember hearing that there were some specific derogatory terms for Westerners based on this smell, but I could be wrong.
But I'd like to be on the lookout so I can be my best self.
I take antihistamines from April to September. Loratadin absolutely has a negative effect on my mood. Mostly because I feel tired I believe. Switched to Ebastin and no more tiredness. However, I am starting to suspect that it also does affect my mood in some way or another.
During winter I take a pill as a precautionary if I’m going to be in any dusty spaces. The day after I sometimes experience mood swings that I cannot explain.
Aged food & drink is higher in histamine. Red wine more than white wine. Dark spirits more than clear spirits. Red meat more than white meat. It can cause spontaneous erections, 60mg of histamine can be used for erectile dysfunction. Histamine can increase blood saturation levels and help reduce the symptoms of COPD and other respiratory problems.
If you consumed alot of histadine, like several heaped table spoons with meals throughout the day, depending on your age and health you will notice some or all of the above. Its one of the fastest amino acids into muscle, its untouched by the liver.
I dont know why you are taking anti-histamines, histamine helps the white immune cells move through tissue, it causes inflammation, there is also a histamine feedback loop in the brain which affects sleep patterns, which is why anti-histamines can help people get to sleep, but lots of histamine can improve sleep conversely.
Loads of studies exist that can be found on Google Scholar, but multiple chemicals affect peoples personality, and their health.
If you want to read up on this, also look at the pathways and other chemicals which work with histidine (or any other amino acid) for that matter.
Did you control for other variables?
Reciprocly, the weight gain induced by certain SSRI is tought to be caused by an antihistaminic effect³.
It would not be surprising if other antihistamines (at least those that cross the BBB) had similar effects because antihistamines are frequently promiscuous (i.e. they have significant affinities with a lots of targets other than the one that make a drug effective) but I would be surprised if histamine, or its inhibition, was directly (with the exclusion of the miserable feeling that comes with allergies) implicated in moods changes.
1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brompheniramine