In the following paper I will point out our current awareness of the state of depression and how and why antidepressants are thought to work. Also I will present some of the contradicting issues which arise from implications of what we know and what we do not know about the state of depression and the medium of its conduction - the nervous system. Before accessing the condition, it is important to define some of the major symptoms, that together make up what doctors refer to as depression. There is much more, but this gives a general idea of a depressed person s mental and physical state and points to the fact that depression is a whole body disease. Serotonin is made up of groups of neurons which emit axons that enervate other neurons throughout the entire nervous system.
Neurons communicate through electrical signals which travel between their axons.
The fact that anatomically serotonin can send signals to various neurons can account why the lack of it may bring about various symptoms of depression. For instance, if a specific signal is not send to the brain, one may have trouble sleeping or concentrating. The connection between depression and serotonin level in the brain was noticed when patients taking a drug Reserpine for hypertension, began to experience symptoms of depression. One of the effects of Reserpine is, in fact, a release of serotonin from pre-synaptic stores. If one isolates this observation from the workings of the entire system, that is, if one assumes that depression is caused simply by a deficiency of a single chemical, then one can develop a substance that increases the level of this chemical.