Symptoms of Depression
Smoking Facts About the Effects of Nicotine and the Brain

Does smoking alleviate symptoms of depression?

The smoking facts reveal that people who suffer with mental depression are more likely to be smokers than people who show no clinical depression symptoms.

This may be because of the mood altering effects of nicotine and the brain neurotransmitters that affect your mood.

Smoking Facts About the Effects of Nicotine and the Brain Neurotransmitters

Some of the effects of nicotine are psychoactive. This means that it can alter brain chemistry.

The mood altering effects of smoking cigarettes are thought to be due to an increase in dopamine levels that result from the effects of nicotine.

Nicotine acts to raise dopamine levels in the brain by direct action on the brain cells.

However, there is another chemical pathway that is thought to be responsible for alleviating the symptoms of depression as well.

Among the numerous cigarette ingredients there are chemicals that increase dopamine and other mood altering neurotransmitters in the brain (serotonin and epinephrine) by inhibiting a substance called monoamine oxidase.

This substance is an enzyme that is known to lower levels of three neurotransmitters that are recognized to affect your mood.

The monoamine oxidase inhibitors in cigarette smoke will be absorbed quickly into your body and raise the levels of dopamine, epinephrine, and serotonin.

You will not know that all this chemistry is happening. You will just know that your mood is lifted somewhat and you feel a bit better than you did before the cigarette.

Eventually you will start to anticipate this reward and look forward to the cigarette for its mood altering effects.

Monoamine oxidase inhibitors are actually a group of drugs that are used as antidepressant medications so it is any wonder that the symptoms of depression are temporarily alleviated by the effects of cigarette smoking?

As early as 1955 the connection between mental depression and smoking was recognized.

In the song "Learning the Blues" Frank Sinatra originally sang about using the effects of nicotine to self medicate for symptoms of depression.

"The cigarettes you light, one after another,
Won't help you forget her, and the way that you love her.
You're only burnin' a torch you can't lose.
But you're on the right track for learnin' the blues."

"Learning the Blues"
Delores Vicker Silvers

Of course the "blues" are much different than a mental illness.

Everyone gets the blues. The blues come and go from time to time and you get over them. Clinical depression symptoms however, are much more severe and last much longer than the "blues". With a clinical depression you eventually become unable to live a normal life.

So does this mean that if you suffer with the symptoms of depression you should depend on the effects of cigarette smoking to improve your mood?

There are many other healthy ways to treat depression that will not result in any of the harmful effects of tobacco or a nicotine addiction.

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