How do SSRI medications work?
That’s a very broad question. There are several different parts to the answer. The bottom line is that no one really knows why SSRI’s help with depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. People theorize that serotonin is involved in these mental illnesses and studies do support that the medications work. No one knows exactly why it is that these medicines work. People have a much better understanding of what SSRI’s actually do, even if they don’t know why that helps. In order to understand what they do, you’d have to understand some basic things about how the cells of the brain communicate. In a very simplistic nutshell, these cells are called neurons and they talk to each other by releasing chemicals from one cell which then get picked up by another cell, and then that cell will release certain chemicals to communicate with the cells around them. The chemicals sitting around between cells get removed through a process called “re-uptake”, which then deactivates the chemic
