ya i just kinda have been comin up with some stuff tell me what ya think

Fact 1 - Seretonin brain chemical responsible for mood, happiness, enjoyment, energy

Fact 2 - A cycle during sleep is responsible for seretonin replenishment

Fact 3 - Clinically depressed patients have been proven to dream more often during sleep



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S= seretonin CA = Cortisol&Adrenaline


Seretonin is depleted everyday naturally through daily activities, such as reading, talking, watching tv, playing sports. The higher the complexity of the activity the more seretonin goin out. Multitasking does this well.

A sleep cycle before dream state restores seretonin everynight allowing you to feel re-energized the next day.

When the body is stressed, it uses seretonin more quickly and costly. Cortisol and Adrenaline kick in when Seretonin is running low to keep things going. An example could be being in a war and fighting for your life everyday. Fight or flight response kicks in producing more and more CA.

The more often the brain is running out of Seretonin the more and more it has to rely on Cortisol and Adrenaline. Also you start to dream more often and longer at night.
Therefore over time a chemical imbalance occurs: S<CA

For some reason the chemical imbalance must cause an error in the sleep cycle causing the dream state to take over almost completely resulting in the loss of the seretonin recharging part leaving barely any seretonin being created to possibly none depending on the extremity of the imbalance.
This results in the negative feelings of clinical depression. The greater the imbalance the more you are going to start feeling bad, sad and everything else. You will feel tired everyday like you never went to sleep because in a way you didn't. You never recharge on seretonin to make you feel energized and happy and this results in complete loss of enjoyment.

This makes sense why depressed people always feel tired yet can't seem to stay asleep. Adrenaline and cortisol are there to begin with to make you alert for a while, but then they become constant. So you are all "up" on CA not able to calm down. Yet your brain knows it needs to hit the seretonin part of sleep and that is why you will feel tired and sleep all the time. Problem is this just results in a circle of nothing positive happening and you waking up just as tired as before yet unable to sleep well and maybe developing insomnia. Youre supposed to be sleeping to recharge but your not actually recharging while asleep. Proving that clinically depressed people can't will there way out of depression unlike a normal depression which can be worked out through the talking kind of therapy. Your brains naturally trying but something about CA halts it.

If this theory is correct then such ideas that excersise, continuing to work fulltime, and other activities can improve clinical depression, is wrong. They all use seretonin, and if you have none to begin with your brain is just using more and more CA. Just making the imbalance worse and worse and you feeling worse. Possibly to the point where people get psychotic symptoms or they get suicidal due to absolutely no seretonin in em.

Therefore unless there is a way to correct the sleep cycle antidepressants are the only way to go. This could explain the need for higher and higher of doses. The greater the severity of the depression/chemical imbalance clearly the higher the mgs that need to be administered to try and correct the imbalance. To speed up the recovery then you should basically be confining yourself to barely any activity at all. Be it mental or physical. You doing more activities are fighting the antidepressants and increasing CA. Doing nothing results in CA levels decreasing and S increasing making the positive balance of S>CA. In the end normality acheived and happiness and enjoyment again.
People getting depressed over a loss of something, or a failure is completely different. They CAN if they choose to enjoy things and move on. Talking therapy can help this. But what possibly connects them is the pain they feel from whatever, results in the stressors leading up to a full blown clinical depression and therefore antidepressants can be effective for them as well keeping the balance in check.

Hey it's an interesting theory but I think it's based on some incorrect assertions.

It's important to remember that serotonin is still not fully understood in its functioning - and its connection to depression is also not fully understood, nor is it fully proven. Plenty of people don't get relief from SSRIs - which suggests that their depression/anxiety is not solely or perhaps even partly related to serotonin issues.

That said, from my understanding, serotonin is actually produced by daily activities such as exercise. I think you would be hard-pressed to find on here someone who regularly felt better from doing nothing - and there are plenty here who spend all day in bed and just get more and more miserable.

It's also not correct, I believe, to say that the body uses serotonin more quickly when it is stressed. It actually gets released, for instance, when you bleed, or when you eat something which irritates your system.

It's not at all clear that serotonin is replenished during sleep - at least one source I found suggests the opposite. From some internet research (not always the most reliable!):

"In "The Secrets of Serotonin," Carol Hart suggests that serotonin has a close relationship to the body's sleep-wake cycle. Serotonin levels are highest in the brain stem when you are awake and active, and almost completely absent when we enter REM sleep, the deepest stage of sleep. During sleep, the body's level of melatonin rises sharply. The production of melatonin is dependent on its synthesis in the pineal gland, which is powered by serotonin. While light increases the production of serotonin, darkness spurs on the synthesis of melatonin. Paired together, these two neurotransmitters are key in maintaining the sleep cycle."

It's also important to remember that, as I understand it, SSRIs don't directly increase serotonin production - they stop the serotonin which has already been produced from being re-absorbed - that's why they're called "re-uptake inhibitors".

There actually was an amazing study I read once which suggested that depressed people who were kept awake for extended periods of time actually improved in mood - as compared to people who went to sleep. But that's not really a practical solution....

I am happy to be corrected if I got my facts or information wrong....

This post has been edited by americandownunder: Oct 31 2009, 04:42 AM

maybe you are right on things as well .

This post has been edited by Forum Admin: Oct 31 2009, 07:36 PM