So, this is a fandom question. A friend and I were discussing the idea of the body swap trope the other day and it raised a few questions about mental illness. The main one was this: if you swapped bodies with someone who had a mental illness, would it go with them or stay with the body? Obviously as an answerable question, that's useless since not every mental illness works the same. So my specific question is this: what about depression? From what I understand there is an imbalance of chemicals in the brain that at least contributes to depression, right? How much of depression is psychological and how much is biological? Is it both?
And my follow up questions about about depression in general, and in particular: how do antidepressants work? Because I know friends who have been on antidepressants and still have "low" periods when they can't get out of bed and seem to exhibit all the symptoms that I would think that antidepressants should prevent...? But since I don't really know how they work, I don't really know why they don't. O_o;;;
(Also, bonus crack fandom question: if someone were to try to self-medicate for depression, what kind of things would they be drawn to?)
(*coughs* This, uh... may or may not be gearing up to actually attempting this fic, but I guess we'll see. ^_~ Thanks for doing this!)
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2014-05-02 09:59 pm (UTC)So, this is a fandom question. A friend and I were discussing the idea of the body swap trope the other day and it raised a few questions about mental illness. The main one was this: if you swapped bodies with someone who had a mental illness, would it go with them or stay with the body? Obviously as an answerable question, that's useless since not every mental illness works the same. So my specific question is this: what about depression? From what I understand there is an imbalance of chemicals in the brain that at least contributes to depression, right? How much of depression is psychological and how much is biological? Is it both?
And my follow up questions about about depression in general, and in particular: how do antidepressants work? Because I know friends who have been on antidepressants and still have "low" periods when they can't get out of bed and seem to exhibit all the symptoms that I would think that antidepressants should prevent...? But since I don't really know how they work, I don't really know why they don't. O_o;;;
(Also, bonus crack fandom question: if someone were to try to self-medicate for depression, what kind of things would they be drawn to?)
(*coughs* This, uh... may or may not be gearing up to actually attempting this fic, but I guess we'll see. ^_~ Thanks for doing this!)