Neurotransmitters - Dr Jonathan Haverkampf

Safety note: Neurotransmitters

This article is educational and does not replace a conversation with a qualified professional who can ask follow-up questions, assess risk, and understand your individual situation. Reading it does not create a doctor-patient, therapist-client, or counsellor-client relationship. See the full website disclaimer.

Symptoms and diagnosis need clinical context

Neurotransmitter explanations can be helpful background, but mental health diagnosis is not made by a simple chemical-imbalance story. Symptoms, life context, physical health, medication, substances, risk, and function all need assessment.

Symptom lists and articles can help you notice patterns and prepare better questions, but they cannot diagnose you. Trusted clinical sources describe diagnosis as a process that may include history, current symptoms, mental-health assessment, physical health, medication and substance review, possible tests to rule out medical causes, and judgement about severity, duration, impairment, and safety.

Medication safety

Medication can affect neurotransmitter systems, but the right medicine, dose, and stopping plan cannot be chosen from general neuroscience information. Speak with a qualified prescriber before changing medication.

Do not start, stop, increase, reduce, combine, or switch medication because of something on this website. Speak with a GP, psychiatrist, pharmacist, or another qualified prescriber. Seek urgent medical help for serious side effects, overdose concerns, severe agitation, mania or psychosis, allergic-reaction symptoms, dangerous withdrawal symptoms, serotonin-syndrome concerns, or thoughts of harming yourself or someone else.

If safety may be at risk

If you or someone else may be in immediate danger, may harm themselves or someone else, or feels unable to stay safe, use emergency help now. In Ireland call 112 or 999, or go to the nearest Emergency Department. Outside Ireland, use your local emergency number.

Neurotransmitters play an important role in transmitting information between neurons across the synaptic cleft. Various regions and pathways in the brain use different patterns of neurotransmitters and different receptor subclasses, which helps to identify the role specific neurotransmitters play in various psychiatric conditions in neuroimaging studies and can also make medication more specific.

Neurotransmitters are stored in synaptic vesicles in the axon terminal. Following a chemical or electric signal, the vesicles fuse with the membrane and release the neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft. At the other end of the synapse, they bind to receptors on the membrane. The usual information transmission path is thus that a wave of electrical depolarisation migrates down the nerve fibre of one neuron, triggers a release of the neurotransmitter into the synapse, which is then picked up by the receptors on the nerve fibre of the next cell, where it leads to an electrical depolarisation or chemical signal. Information can be passed by this mechanism from one cell to the next along the nerve fibres of the cells contained in the neural network, while the neurotransmitter system allows to finetune and control it.

Presynaptic receptors may help in the autoregulation of the quantity of neurotransmitters released from an axon terminal into the synapse. They can, for example, inhibit the availability and release of neurotransmitters, when the neurotransmitter concentration outside the neuron is too high.

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