Serotonin map of brain could lead to better targeted antidepressants (and maybe even psychedelics ;-)

Did you even read the article you posted?

Excerpt:

"He will build on preliminary studies of serotonin neurons in mice while the animals perform “reward and punishment” tasks. By monitoring their behaviour during the tasks, he and his colleagues will be able to map how the neurons participate in well-known responses that are analogous to human behaviours. He said that scientists have long been interested in mapping mood in the brain by dissecting the behaviour of serotonin neurons but in the past they have not had the technology to do it. “In neuroscience we are where physics was with Galileo and Newton,” he said. “It’s basic stuff. An observer might say we should know that [already], it seems like such an obvious thing we want to understand.”

I sympathize with your pov, but then you get into a whole slew of debate over the ethics of those kinds of practices. Not only that, but you're undermining the methods a large portion of medical science has used to make progress. Mice have been utilized in clinical tests for a reason. Their behaviors and diseases parallel that of humans more so than the majority of animals, they reproduce and die quickly, and they are docile enough to preform tests on. To reiterate what I highlighted above: the information your article covers wouldn't exist had it not been for tests on mice.

With that said, most anti-depressants that affect the serotonergic system are in --what I would classify as (a grain of salt here: I am not a FDA official)-- phase V trials. They "passed" phase IV trials after having been deemed safe enough for widespread distribution (although they can make depression worse and even lead to suicide in a some cases). However, there's still hardly anything that substantiates their efficacy. All we know is that their use marked a slight statical significance in comparison to that of the administered placebo, even though there was no clinical significance.

This train of thought leads me to a few questions: In the current phase of anti-depressants that affect serotonergic systems, is this Machiavellian approach, incorporating the the use of secular human sacrifice, really the correct method to employ? All of this seems to be just as complex as the bio-mechanistic reasons for depression in the first place. Finally, I want to say, while it's widely understood that entheogens like ayahuasca, DMT, and psilocybin are non-selective serotonin agonists, I believe that when it comes to a mental illness like depression, it's the experience and integration of said experience that facilitates healing, underlying mechanisms be damned. This doesn't mean I'm anti-science (I hope to see it all explained) it just means that I prioritize healing first.

/r/Psychonaut Thread Link - theguardian.com