Both schizophrenia and depression have dopamine components to them, mostly schizophrenia. In fact, anti-psychotic drugs work on dopamine levels. And so, what you need to be doing is balancing your dopamine, not raising it or lowering it. You're trying to maintain dopamine at a normal level. And again, we think that people who are addicted have trouble experiencing pleasure because their dopamine systems are altered.
Drugs of abuse have at least two categories of effects.
That is, they literally destroy cells or functions in the brain. For example, if you use inhalants, you literally destroy brain tissue. If you use large doses of methamphetamine, we believe you literally destroy both dopamine and serotonin neurons. In most cases, however, we believe changes in the brain associated with addiction are reversible in one way or another, or they can be compensated for. We know some of those changes, like the ability to produce dopamine, recover over time.