The Most Agreeable Mind in the Room
AI chatbots feel like supportive therapists, but new psychiatric data shows their endless agreement can reinforce delusions in vulnerable minds.
The Depression Trial That Never Touched the Brain
The Depression Trial That Never Touched the Brain Here is a strange result. Last month, researchers gave an arthritis drug to a group of patients with hard-to-treat depression, and many of them got better. The drug, tocilizumab, does nothing to serotonin, dopamine, or any of the usual suspects. It works on the immune system, quieting […]
The Opioid System Psychiatry Chose to Forget
There is a system in the brain that regulates social bonding, emotional pain, pleasure, and the will to keep going. It is, by most accounts, one of the most important systems for understanding why people become suicidal. Psychiatry has spent the better part of four decades pretending it doesn’t exist. The endogenous opioid system, the […]
Your Diagnosis Might Be a Zip Code, Not a Disease
The labels psychiatry assigns to mental illness are useful. They give patients language for what they’re feeling, give clinicians a shared vocabulary, give insurance companies something to reimburse. But they aren’t exact the way a CT scan is exact. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the field’s bible since 1952, carves the mind into categories based […]
The Most Dangerous Drug in Psychedelic Medicine Just Got an FDA Green Light
In the Bwiti tradition of Gabon, ibogaine is not a drug. It is an initiation. Young members of the community consume the bark of the Tabernanthe iboga root and spend days in a visionary state that the Bwiti consider a kind of death and rebirth. Western pharmacology has spent sixty years trying to figure out […]
The FDA Just Fast-Tracked Psychedelics. Here’s What That Actually Means.
For most of modern psychiatry’s existence, clinicians have been handing patients the same basic categories of medication (SSRIs, SNRIs, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics) and hoping one sticks. Try a pill, wait six weeks, feel weird, try another, wait six more weeks, feel different-weird. It helps a lot of people, but for treatment-resistant depression, the kind that doesn’t […]