sincerely, a person who has been on prozac for 9 years
this is in response to some shitty stuff i’ve seen on my dash recently. it’s super simplified, so if you’d like to know some more indepth stuff on how exactly it works, google it—OR BETTER YET actually talk to a mental health doctor psychiatrist person wow
I really learned a lot from this. Wow.
There are also other additional medications that are not SSRIs. For example, in addition to Lexapro – an SSRI as mentioned above – I take Wellbutrin, which has nothing to do with Serotonin levels, but rather is a Dopamine reuptake inhibitor, among other things. SSRIs alone don’t do anything for me but give me headaches, whereas Wellbutrin, with a small dosage of Lexopro, has helped a lot because Wellbutrin helped with my hypersomnia (basically the opposite of insomnia. Unlike most people with depression who tend to have insomnia, I had hypersomnia, and would sleep about 12+ hours a day and still feel tired constantly.) As stated in the powerpoint, you need to try different things and different combinations to find what works bext.
Depression isn’t just caused by wacky serotonin levels, but actually affects lots of chemicals in the brain, and can be affected by multiple different neurotransmitters apart from serotonin. Depression is absolutely a physiological problem, and that’s why I have no stigmas against taking pills. Just like someone who needs to inject insulin for Diabetes, I need to take pills to make sure my brain functions properly.