I think you’re already seeing this with how GLP-1 drugs are rolling out for all sorts of off-label use. I'm not really thinking that GLP-1 should necessarily be used as a treatment for dysphoria. My bigger point is that whatever stories people tell themselves about their motivations or feelings, humans are basically blind to the mechanisms that generate them.
The brain systems that reinforce desire or trigger depression do tie into higher-order thought, but they’re operating on a more basic level, and most of the time we’re not even aware of the feedback loops we’ve built for ourselves. Just because someone feels a strong compulsion or state of suffering from something doesn't mean that they have some deeper understanding of their needs than others do. Humans aren’t reliable narrators of their own experiences. Neurons don’t care about your long-term outcomes or the deep truth of your soul, they just fire in response to the patterns that have already occurred.
When someone is chasing an unreachable desire, it’s not passive. It’s active reinforcement, a loop that becomes more ingrained over time. Disorders like addiction, depression, compulsive eating, or gender dysphoria aren’t like discrete tumors you can point to in the brain. They’re more like maladaptive attractor states: stable but harmful equilibria that emerge from a mix of congenital predisposition and environment, and then lock themselves in through repetition.
That’s why the old chemical imbalance model that was pedaled with serotonin always failed to materialize concretely. The brain isn’t a static machine with a single broken part, it’s a dynamic system that feedbacks on itself in a continuous loop. Even with SSRIs, the long-term picture isn’t “fixing serotonin levels" for the people they do help. Much more likely it’s the disruption of the old equilibrium that allows the brain to finding a new one. That's why even for patients where the SSRIs had pronounced effects, effectiveness can attenuate over time as the brain adapts to a new homeostasis and changes neurotransmitter profiles accordingly, and if other factors aren't in place, the depressive spiral can return.
This same logic applied to Dopamine and Norepinephrine modulating drugs, and psychedelics too, they aren't fixing a chemical imbalance, they are disrupting a loop. GLP-1 drugs may work not just by tweaking satiety, but by interrupting compulsive reinforcement cycles. LSD or psilocybin don’t have any direct mechanism to fix brain chemistry, yet they seem to destabilize rigid states like rumination or depressive spirals.
That's the thing that gets me so much about trans-rights logic, even if the suffering is real, its being generated by an internal stimulus, which should instantly make it suspect in terms of interventions. Instead, trans suffering is de facto interpreted as revealing a deep truth about the individual in the way no other similar belief or compulsion would be.
