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The Nervous System

Treating Depression

Every now and then we all feel a little blue, these feelings can be caused by losing a loved one.
Clinical depression goes much further than just feeling down. Depression has many symptoms,
including lack of energy, abnormal eating habits (either too much or too little)and sleeping problems
(also too much or too little). Often a person can feel worthless and have thoughts of committing
suicide. The cause of depression and its symptoms are a mystery but we do understand that it is an
illness associated with biochemical changes in the brain. A lot of research goes on to explain that it is
associated with a lack of amines serotonin and norephinephrine. Therefore pharmacological treatment
strategies often try to increase amine concentrations in the brain.

One class of antidepressants is monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Mono amine oxidase is a enzyme
that breaks down your amines like norephinephrine and serotonin. Because the antidepressants inhibit
their degradation they will remain in the synaptic cleft for a longer period of time making the effect just
as if you had increased theses types of neurotransmitters.

A newer class of antidepressants is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI's). With SSRI's
decreasing the uptake of serotonin back into the cell that will increase the amount of serotonin present
in the synaptic cleft. SSRI's are more specific than the monoamine oxidase inhibitors because they only
affect serotonergic synapses. You might recognize these SSRI's by name as Prozac and Paxil.

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