c'mon chemicals!

some more background: I love studying the brain. it truly fascinates me. it's a super cool thing to learn about, and it's what I've planned for the focus of my undergraduate education.

in my neuroscience classes, I hear a lot about psychiatric disorders, and by now it's sort of like reading a rehearsed, old book every time I'm presented with the information. "symptoms of schizophrenia, positive and negative, heard about that.... bipolar disorder, mood stabilizers..... anxiety and depression, oh I take pills for that!" last year I took an EXCELLENT cognitive neuroscience class and wrote my final paper on the physiological and cognitive mechanisms of post-traumatic stress disorder. though not what I suffer from, I learned a lot about the systems that regulate (or fail to regulate) anxiety and stress from my research.

essentially, the point of all that jammer was to convey that I'm aware of the mechanisms that my medications use to ease my symptoms. I take an SSRI, which stands for a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. in English, that means that the medication works to increase brain levels of serotonin. serotonin is a neurotransmitter that has important regulatory effects on mood, sleep, and appetite (among other things).

these drugs do not work immediately, and it is unclear why exactly that is. (the science of psychiatry is miserably foggy at this point in time.) the physiological mechanism is relatively simple, but requires some explaining. neurons [what we think of as brain cells, though there are other types of cells in the brain] communicate through chemical and electrical signals. neurotransmitters work as a form of communication between neurons. neuron 1 will release the chemicals, and they will float in the space between neuron 1 and neuron 2 known as the synaptic cleft. as long as they stay in the cleft, they will act on receptors from neuron 2, which can have a variety of effects on neuron 2 (either inhibitory or excitatory). the chemicals are removed from the cleft by reuptake, where neuron 1 absorbs and recycles the chemicals it had previously released. (alternatively, the chemicals can be degraded while still in the cleft.) selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors work by preventing the rapid reuptake of serotonin by neuron 1, leaving it in the synaptic cleft longer, and hence allowing it to act on neuron 2 for a longer amount of time, strengthening the signal. this is what my drugs do.

certain SSRIs work differently than others. Zoloft and Paxil have short half-lives and don't stay in the bloodstream for too long before another pill is needed, whereas Prozac has a longer half-life. these qualities lead to relative difficulty/ease in phasing off the medications. most anti-depressant medications take weeks to work properly, unlike certain faster-acting anxiety pills (think Xanax).

thank you for your attention during this crash-course in neurobiology and psychiatry. yay!