Gassen et al. (2015) reported that fluoxetine activates autophagic pathways in an FKBP51-dependent manner. More recently, fluoxetine was found to activate autophagy in a rat subarachnoid hemorrhage brain injury model (Liu et al., 2018). In addition, fluoxetine reversed depressive behavior and up-regulated BDNF and autophagy-associated proteins (LC3-II) in normal mice. However, microglia-specific autophagy-deficient mice showed higher inflammatory levels and reduced BDNF expression (Tan et al., 2018). Here, BDNF is linked to injury.