So by taking SSRIs to hack your brain's level of shyness you might actually end up dampening your entrepreneurial vibes and becoming a middle-manager. Crazy, huh.
So by taking SSRIs to hack your brain's level of shyness you might actually end up dampening your entrepreneurial vibes and becoming a middle-manager. Crazy, huh.
Perhaps being depressed makes me more creative. Perhaps the medication suppresses something inadvertantly, who knows (AFAIK, no one does, at least for now). But there was a definite correlation between the SSRI and my creative side.
http://www.etfrc.com/ChemicalImbalances.htm
"No experiment has ever shown that anyone has an "imbalance" of any neurotransmitters or any other brain chemicals."
Alternatively, ask an honest psychiatrist whether anyone has any solid idea just why the drugs work, when they work. Or why they don't, when they don't.
"How are the chemical imbalances which are the supposed basis for the prescription of "antidepressants" diagnosed? Is exploratory neurosurgery performed, using some technique that allows the surgeon to quantify synaptic transmitter levels? No, the very idea is absurd. Is a spinal tap, then, done to at least measure, on a gross scale, the distribution of neurotransmitter metabolites? Of course not – how many people have undergone spinal taps before receiving a prescription for Effexor®? Is blood at least drawn, to test something? No. This diagnosis – the diagnosis of the most subtle of chemical disorders in the most complex organ in the body – is made on the basis of the patient's report of feeling sad and lethargic. Try to imagine a hematologist diagnosing leukemia this way to get a sense of just how ridiculous this idea is."
"The principal reason for rejecting biopsychiatry (aside from the fact that intellectual honesty demands its rejection) is that it locates the cause of psychic suffering in people's "bad brains," and excludes the conditions of modern life, or anything else, from consideration as the cause of such pain."
Note also that the author defends your right to take any drug, if you wish to. However, he defends it from the personal freedom point of view, and attacks the (popular yet unfounded) notion that these drugs return the individual to some nebulous ideal of "mental health."
I write code for medical devices for a living; if a substance found in the body is therapeutically interesting, then someone, somewhere has built an instrument to measure it :-)
There is no doubt that we can measure the concentration of dopamine or serotonin in an aqueous solution (and eventually, within a brain.) Whether there can be any clinical point to such a measurement is debatable.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperament_and_Character_Inven...
[2] http://www.anthropediafoundation.org/site/PageServer?pagenam...