Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my.

And so. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 126, serotonin and depression.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this episode, we're going to talk about the role of serotonin and depression,

and this is obviously a serious and a bit of a sensitive topic, so I will recommend that

listeners exercise their discretion in whether

they want to continue listening on. I'm not primarily going to talk about the clinical

manifestations of depression, although I will mention that a little bit at the start. For the most

part, I'm going to talk about the role of serotonin specifically in depression. I'll do another

episode at some point in the future where I discuss

major depressive disorder and dysthymia and other conditions more generally and maybe look a bit

more about other aspects of depression, of which there are many. But here I want to focus a bit

more narrowly on just the role of serotonin in depression, and particularly what I want to do is try

to look at how we can understand the development of a very sort of complex high-level phenomenon like depression

at a molecular biological level. And part of the interest in this is in understanding the

connection between mood disorders like depression and psychopharmological treatments, such as

selective serotonin

re-uptake inhibitors and other psychoactive drugs, which in some sense seem to have a very

simplistic mechanism of action and yet have very sort of complicated high-level effects.

So the question is sort of how to draw this gap between the molecular level and the very

...