The Balanced Brain by Camilla Nord;

Author:Camilla Nord;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

* However, even today other common antidepressants target the noradrenaline as well as the serotonin system (e.g. duloxetine, venlafaxine).

7.

Other drugs

I moved to London when I was twenty-one. That year, I was invited to a St Patrick’s Day house party near where I lived off Brick Lane. It was exactly the sort of party I had imagined getting invited to when I moved to east London. I was a little embarrassed because I was dressed very boringly and, although no one had told me, it seemed to be a costume party. Near me in front of the DJ stood someone dressed as a caterpillar, smoking an old-fashioned pipe (there was a rabbit elsewhere and more than one girl in gingham, so I surmised it was an Alice in Wonderland theme). An hour or so after I had arrived, around midnight, the music was brought to an abrupt halt by someone jumping (or falling – it wasn’t clear) from a tiny spiral staircase onto the dance floor. Everyone withdrew in shock. It looked superficially like the person who fell might have broken their femur, so a bunch of people, myself included, carried this person into an adjoining bedroom and called an ambulance. The most remarkable thing about the whole episode was that the person who had fallen was not screaming or crying – a bit shaken, but certainly not in the kind of pain this visible injury would normally cause. Some of this underreaction was probably down to adrenaline or pain-induced opioids, but some of it was definitely down to drugs.

The world over, the most common drugs people take to enhance wellbeing are not antidepressants or any other medication, but recreational drugs. Recreational drugs is a broad category: it means every substance humans consume for their enjoyable experience-altering properties (rather than their ability to quench hunger or thirst). Caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, cocaine and heroin all fall into this category. You probably don’t need any studies to tell you that recreational drugs can temporarily enhance wellbeing in most people – you have probably tried at least one of them for yourself.

I cannot say for certain which substance was involved in the Alice in Wonderland party accident because pain suppression is a common consequence of many different recreational drugs, but particularly alcohol. People punch through windows, bang their heads, fall down stairs, break bones and seem relatively impervious if they’re a few drinks deep. It hurts the next day – not at the time.

Despite its visible association with harm (both harm to your own body and social harm), alcohol also has a largely positive effect on wellbeing if consumed in small-to-moderate amounts.180 One of the most noticeable positive effects of alcohol is its rapid effects on stress. The majority of people become less stressed after a drink. This psychological stress reduction is mirrored in the body’s stress response. Normally, if you were to experience something stressful (pain, psychological stress, loud noise, etc.), your heart rate would increase substantially – alcohol dampens this effect of stress on the heart.

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