Everyone was Wrong about Antipsychotics

[hapl808]

An article in Wired that dovetails nicely with my personal view that all of the 'knowledge' about neurotransmitters and how the brain works are, at best, theories. We like to think we have a good idea how to inhibit uptake of serotonin or dopamine or target specific receptor activity, but in reality we are mostly pulling levers in the dark and then rationalizing what we observed in confident sounding academic papers that will likely be proven wrong within the next decade.

https://www.wired.com/story/everyone-was-wrong-about-antipsychotics/

 

[sunshine44]

Thank you.
This topic needs to be spoken about loudly from the back row. Psych. Drug survivor here.

 

[Hip]

An article in Wired that dovetails nicely with my personal view that all of the 'knowledge' about neurotransmitters and how the brain works are, at best, theories.

That's not just a personal view, but the view of entire the scientific community.

If you take a condition like schizophrenia, there are many competing theories about what causes it. From brain abnormalities to neurotransmitter imbalances to genetics to infections.

Even if you just focus on neurotransmitters, you have many different theories: the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, the glutamate hypothesis, the acetylcholine hypothesis, the serotonin hypothesis, the norepinephrine hypothesis and the adenosine hypothesis.

 

[hapl808]

That's not just a personal view, but the view of entire the scientific community.

Unfortunately that community excludes physicians and psychiatrists, who are convinced they already know everything.

I've also wondered here when people talk about their glutamate or dopamine or norepinephrine. I've read lots of stuff about neurotransmitters, and I still have no idea how you definitively differentiate between norepinephrine and glutamate, serotonin vs dopamine, etc. I sometimes think others understand it better, and other times I think everyone is just making the symptoms and narrative fit whatever they believe to be true.

But yeah. I remember telling a friend that we have no idea what is happening to serotonin in a live human and no reliable way to measure it and he was surprised (and he has a Masters in psychology). Makes sense because psychiatrists speak so confidently about the pharmacology of SSRIs or SNRIs or benzos or whatever.

 

[godlovesatrier]

Gut microbiome plays a massive role too. Lots of bacteria produce dopamine and serotonin. Of course mental health issues can be caused by a wide variety of things, in women it can just be due to very bad estrogen spikes or a lack of in specific parts of the cycle. For men equally there are likely things that can set our hormones in the wrong direction. But the microbiome definitely plays a role - whether you'd benefit from changing it is a process of experimentation really.