But it's kind of an important question.

It is an important question.

I would say...

they would agree with me that there is an unusual amount of struggle, even in cases where there's a dramatic improvement, where people come with horrible levels of suffering, and a psychopharmacologic intervention results in a dramatic reduction of that suffering.

that it's often still a struggle to encourage a patient to continue with an ongoing regimen when it's needed.

And there are certain conditions that require chronic treatment.

And I mentioned bipolar disorder.

It's interesting that something as describable as dysthymia responds to purely more serotonin without necessarily more, and if anything, less dopamine and norepinephrine if presumably there's a compensation and they go down.

... understanding, and I think the drugs help us do that.

Sure.

Well, on a foundational level, psychotropics historically have worked at the level of intervening on neurotransmitter modulation, and particularly the monoamines: serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine.

And SSRIs are drugs that selectively, for the most part, target serotonin and modulating serotonin neurotransmission through signal.

They have mechanisms, one particular me- mechanism, glad to mention it if you'd like me to, but one particular mechanism to kind of amplify the signal, and tha- that's how it works for that drug.

Now, there are also probably familiar to many of the audience a newer class called SNRIs, serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, and that gives a certain balance because raising serotonin can decrease dopamine.

So someone, let's say, with attention deficit disorder who has low dopamine as part of the problem of their attention issues, if they go on an SSRI, they could exacerbate it, and people often talk in terms of side effects about SSRIs.

That's, that's very interesting