Life Hacks for Health

The most common drugs used for depression are SSRI's (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). This is an alternative to just providing more serotonin. If additional serotonin is provided via supplementation of 5-htp, the drive for neurotransmitter homeostasis will quickly consume the excess serotonin. Thus, a person would have to take 5-htp frequently, and the levels of serotonin would be somewhat of a rollercoaster. One solution is to have a time-release dosage: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4946063. 5-htp is not a harmful chemical, but a naturally occurring metabolite. It is a metabolite of tryptophan. Tryptophan is an amino acid, but although naturally occuring in food, it's metabolism creates toxic by-products in addition to 5-htp, so taking 5-htp is healthier.

SSRI's have a lot more side effects than 5-htp. So when your psychiatrist suggests you take a certain drug, just tell them you'd like to first get an allergy test on that drug. There will likely be resistance and excuses towards not doing so, like trying to tell you that side effects are not allergies. In any case, you shouldn't be allergic to any drug you take, so what's the harm of a small test? Never mind that if you chew the pill in your mouth, it leaves a burn mark in your gums. Maybe the digestion process takes care of that, but maybe it doesn't. They test for food allergies by placing the food on your skin, so why shouldn't it be the same for a drug? If I learn more about this, I will add the info here.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3686152
“ However, multiple negative effects of SSRI treatment during pregnancy have recently been identified, with the limitation that it is often difficult to control for confounding effects of maternal psychopathology. Ultrasonic investigation of human fetuses provides evidence that SSRIs taken during pregnancy alter the brain physiology starting as early as the beginning of second trimester (Mulder et al., 2011). Combined recordings of general motor activity, rapid eye movements, and fetal heart rate variability indicate that fetuses exposed to SSRIs during gestation have abnormal increases in motor movements during phases of non-REM sleep compared to fetuses from drug-free mothers with comparable levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. Furthermore blood flow recordings at 36 weeks gestation in the middle cerebral artery were significantly decreased in fetuses exposed to SSRIs during gestation (Rurak et al., 2011). At birth, babies prenatally exposed to SSRIs display a wide range of neurobehavioral alterations, including lower APGAR scores, increased irritability, and blunted pain reactivity (Casper et al., 2003; Oberlander et al., 2005), as well as reduced fetal head growth (El Marroun et al., 2012). More recently prenatal antidepressants were shown to shift developmental milestones on infant speech perception tasks in utero and at 6 and 10 month of age (Weikum et al., 2012), suggesting a role for 5-HT in modulating critical time period maturation in humans. At later time-points, children exposed to SSRIs during pregnancy display increased internalizing behaviors (Oberlander et al., 2010) and decreased scores on psychomotor developmental scales (Casper et al., 2011). The most worrisome finding comes from a recent study reporting a two-fold increase in the risk for autism-spectrum disorders in children exposed to SSRIs during pregnancy (Croen et al., 2011). ”