The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.

I’ll often say something like the way Zoloft works, is, it increases the level of serotonin in your brain (or synapses, neurons) and, presumably, the reason you’re depressed or anxious is that you have some sort of a deficiency. And I say that [chuckles] not because I really believe it, because I know the evidence really isn’t there for us to understand the mechanism—I think I say that because patients want to know something. And they want to know that we as physicians have some basic understanding of what we’re doing when we’re prescribing medications. They certainly don’t want to know that a psychiatrist essentially has no idea how these medications work

A large body of research going back decades indicates that stress of the type Bascom experienced can affect the fetus, causing physical and psychological harm that lingers throughout the child’s lifespan. With its chaotic response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States has unwittingly subjected more than a year’s worth of newborns to conditions resembling an enormous experiment on the long-term effects of stress during pregnancy.

cw: article contains a lot of anti-fat bias

people with serious mental illness have a life expectancy that's up to 25 years shorter than the general population.

“Then, scientists genetically removed D2Rs from the striatum of lean mice to determine if there was a causal link between D2Rs and inactivity. Researchers then placed the lean mice on a high-fat diet.

Surprisingly, they found that these mice did not gain more weight, despite their physical inactivity.

This suggests that although deficits in striatal D2R contribute to physical inactivity in obesity, such inactivity is more “a consequence than a cause of obesity,” as the authors put it.”

“It was like if you are on a four-lane highway with cars coming from everywhere and then you are on a country road.”