Upvoted for the news that these treatments are speeding towards approval. However, the point that no one knows how these new treatments work seems silly, given my understanding that no one seems to know exactly how antidepressants in general work either (or at least they didn’t until recently?), even ones that have been used for decades, like Prozac.
Here’s a quote from an article from 2021: I’ve been making references on this blog for years about how we don’t even know how antidepressants work
Hell there are a bunch of receptors in the brain that are called “cannabinoid receptors”, because at the time of their discovery the only thing we knew about them was that they were activated by cannabis. Since then, we’ve developed a slightly wider understanding of their function in the body’s normal operation, and yet the name still stands.
the only thing we knew about them was that they were activated by cannabis.
I probably should be sleeping. I know this because as I was reading, my eyes lost focus a bit and I read that as “activated by cannibals.” Cue the confusion.
“activated by cannibals.”
Kuru has entered the chat.
We also don’t know how common over the counter Tylenol and Advil work.
And anesthesia
Nobody knows how or why a great many existing psychological medications work, so that should be just fine, then.
Yea this is just straight up fear mongering. We don’t even know how depression works fully why would we know how the drugs to treat it do.
Due to bunch of stuff, by early 20s, was so disconnected from body. No idea how to connect with people.
Then was at a healthy, responsible community rave. Given a dose of ecstasy, and as it kicked in, people let me fall into a group hug mass, bodies warm, gentle, caring. Found self looking up at one person, a closeness, openness I’d never felt before.
Ecstasy showed me what was possible, opened something in me i didnt know was there. Only done it twice, but that was enough. If done responsibly, some drugs can be quite therapeutic.
True, but mostly irrelevant. SSRIs are the first line treatment for a bunch of shit, we don’t know how they work, either.
Yes we do, it’s right there in the name. They inhibit reuptake of serotonin in select areas of the brain.
The drug gets onto neurotransmitters that take one chemical that signals for the brain to retake serotonin. But since those transmitters are “clogged” by the drug instead, the indicator chemical can’t do it’s job, so the serotonin stays in your brain longer.
No. We don’t. While obviously, we know it inhibits serotonin reuptake, we do not know why that SSRI action works. They were developed based on the monoamine hypothesis - basically “too little neurotransmitter activity, better beef it up”. And so it does! In a matter of days. Any actual antidepressive effect notoriously can take weeks or months, so that obviously isn’t the entire mechanism.
God, that’s a book and a half of neuro-interaction, isn’t it?
Easy. Human brains are by nature stubborn and compulsive. Psychedelic experience shakes up the jar.
Do we need to know how things work, when we can objectively prove that they do work?
I mean, if you go by the observations here, then basically every treatment for every syndrome should be void. In general, something is called a “syndrome” because we don’t know what is wrong, we just know that something is wrong, and we know that treating it in certain ways alleviates the symptoms.
There is ongoing debate over how acetaminophen works… We still don’t entirely know but anyone can buy it OTC and even take so much that it kills them. Mechanisms are important, but far from the only criteria we have for determining if a drug is “safe.”
