The antidepressants that make you a stable, tolerable human being may be working wonders for you, but when you pee them out, they wind up in water systems and end up messing with fish. According to a study published in Environmental Science & Technology, the human pharmaceuticals sloshing through wastewater plants are messing with the brain chemistry of aquatic creatures, and those fish are way more sensitive to our meds than we are.Researchers at the Tokyo University of Science cloned brain protein genes from medaka and ayu fish to test how human antidepressant drugs affected those proteins, focusing on monoamine transporters like SERT, DAT, and NET. The researchers focused on some of the most popular antidepressants, like Lexapro, Cymbalta, and Prozac.Human Antidepressants Are Ending Up in Rivers, and Fish May Be Especially VulnerableHumans and fish share neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, but the study found that fish serotonin transporters are much more fragile than ours. In multiple instances, the researchers found it took tenfold lower drug concentrations to shut down the fish version of the protein compared to the human equivalent. This means that the concentrations required to get the medication working in a human brain are completely overpowering a fish’s brain.Even stranger was that there were antidepressant drugs like mirtazapine and quetiapine that barely even touched those same specific transporters in human brains but clobbered the fish versions, leading to unpredictable biological side effects that human clinical trials never screened for, with mirtazapine in particular being found to have a small blocking effect on fish serotonin protein.The drug concentrations needed to disrupt these fish proteins in the lab directly correlated with the pollutant levels already measured in real-world rivers and streams worldwide. This isn’t a case of the researchers overdoing it to see any kind of result. They were just matching exactly what we’re putting out there every day.Ocean creatures are out there swimming through bizarre cocktails of everything we put in us, even our medications, and as a result are accidentally getting turbo doses of the drugs we put in us.The post All Those Antidepressants You’re Peeing Out Are Messing With Fish, New Study Finds appeared first on VICE.