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 […]