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Low mood and hard feelings
Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.
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7 practicesHow long you have · A minute
Approach · Medical and treatment
You can say what an SSRI does in one sentence. It blocks the doorway that carries serotonin back out of the gap between two nerve cells, so more of it stays there for longer and is likelier to be picked up.
Worth being able to say plainly, because most people are carrying something vaguer and more frightening than that. It also sets a fair expectation.…
The blockade is partial. Serotonin is not trapped in there forever: enzymes still break it down and the transporters that are not blocked carry on working.
That matters for accuracy and it matters for reassurance, because people do picture something flooding and stuck. It also explains why serotonin…
Serotonin syndrome comes from stacking, and the second agent is usually something nobody thought to mention: a migraine tablet, a cough medicine, a herbal remedy for low mood.
Triptans, tramadol, dextromethorphan, linezolid and St John's wort all count, as do other antidepressants. Someone who mentions in passing that they…
When someone says they react badly to normal doses of almost everything, take it as information about their body rather than as a personality trait.
Bodies differ in how fast they break a medicine down. Give two people the same dose and one of them may be holding far more of it for far longer,…
Whether a medicine works can turn on something as ordinary as taking it with food or moving it to bedtime.
Vilazodone is the clear case. On an empty stomach a good deal less of it is absorbed, and the nausea it can cause is easier to sit with overnight…
If a medicine leaves you wired, restless or with a pulse that will not settle, report it rather than tolerating it quietly.
The antidepressants that act on noradrenaline as well as serotonin can raise blood pressure and put nerves on edge, and with some of them that grows…
The same medicine can be dangerous given one way and safe given another. Slow release is not a marketing word.
Bupropion was pulled from the market over seizures and came back once a slow release form existed, because what drove the risk was the sharp peak…