A great blog by The Dog Zombie
We don’t actually know how behavior medications work. We know how they change the operations of cells — for example, we know facts like “this medication makes cells slower to recycle this particular chemical.” But we don’t have a good idea of how those cellular-level changes result in behavior-level changes. We don’t know how these medications make individuals feel better.
And that’s a problem, because not every individual responds to a particular behavior med in the same way. A pathologically fearful dog might have nasty side effects on one med, no response to a second, and then respond beautifully to a third. It’s hard on s to have to try a variety of medications before finding the right one, especially as it takes a month or two to be sure that a particular medication is or isn’t working. (Oh, yeah, and the same is true for humans who use these drugs.)
