Serotonin

The serotonin reuptake inhibiting (SSRI) group of drugs came on stream in the late 1980s, nearly two decades after first being mooted. The delay centred on finding an indication. They did not have hoped for lucrative antihypertensive or antiobesity profiles. A 1960s idea that serotonin concentrations might be lowered in depression1 had been rejected,2 and in clinical trials the SSRIs lost out to the older tricyclic antidepressants as a treatment for severe depression (melancholia).3 4 5  

While serotonin is an important brain chemical, 90% of it is made outside the brain, in the gut. Now, a study of mice suggests gut bacteria play a key role.  

The commercial success of SSRI antidepressants is based on a ‘myth’ that has been a 'costly distraction' from better treatment approaches, suggests one expert.  

Healy does a great disservice to jobbing psychiatrists with his editorial on serotonin and depression, the marketing of a myth.1 By portraying them as “co-opted into a myth” about low levels of serotonin being the sole cause of depression he paints them as gullible. And by stating that this theory is “an easy shorthand …  

If a pharmacologist has to name one of the finest medical marvels in the history of Neuro-pharmacology then Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors or SSRIs