Erin Calipari, an addiction researcher at Vanderbilt University, working to understand addiction to find treatments. It is challenging, she said, because addiction has different causes in people, depending on what they’re addicted to a substance(s) or behavior(s), their motivations, genetic make up, sex and access to their addictive habits. Which neural pathways get rewired or shut down because of their particular addiction(s) also vary widely.
Our brain is wired in concert with our thoughts, beliefs, needs, wants, resonance, intent and what we choose to focus on. Additions and habit drive our emotional actions and decisions. With increased drug use, there’s decreased dopamine for the brain to operate with, which means it’s harder to stay conscious and focused on new information and options.
Drugs like opioids act on dopamine. Dopamine fires when things are new or different, whether they’re good or bad. And in that way, dopamine is critical for helping you learn. Drugs basically continue to push dopamine even when things are no longer new or different. The brain continues to think that something is important, signaling you to keep paying attention to it. But while drugs increase dopamine in the moment, long-term drug use depletes it, which means learning new constructive information and options is a real challenge.
Addiction is difficult to address because of its many complexities of factors involved, like co-morbid of anxiety, depression, pain management or compulsive behaviors.
Psychedelics and MENTAL Health Healing
Psychedelic therapy isn’t as simple as just taking a drug such as LSD, ketamine, or MDMA and waiting for your depression to go away. Treatment unfolds over several sessions of preparation to pin down how and when to enter the psychedelic experience. When the drug arrives, it’s accompanied by ambient music and a pair of eye shades. The patient pops the pill, sits back, and lets the drug get to work on their brain. Lastly comes the therapist-aided process of integrating the patient’s new information from their experience.
“It’s a big, holistic process,” said Boris Heifets, an anesthesiologist and neuroscientist at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute who has previously worked alongside Malenka to study the mechanisms of MDMA. “These drugs are more like ‘catalysts’ than they are treatments.”
MDMA or ecstasy is an empathogen which is a class of psychoactive drugs that induce and amplify a sense of empathy, oneness, relatedness and feeling connected to those around you. A way to bridge fractured relationships and may help lessen the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Psychedelics seem to work by binding to the serotonin 2a receptor, one of the 15 specialized receptor molecules the serotonin system uses to coordinate brain activity. Psychedelic therapy is hard to regulate and requires more oversight than traditional therapy, making psychedelic therapy expensive and tricky to scale up. U.S. researchers define psychedelics as powerful psychoactive substances that are generally considered physiologically safe and do not lead to dependence or addiction. Their origin predates written history, and they were employed by early cultures in many sociocultural or ritual contexts.
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic, that has some hallucinogenic effects that distorts perceptions of sight and sound, which acts by distancing users from reality. Placing patients in a dream-like state of sensory deprivation of the biology’s senses.
Entactogens and dissociative anesthetics don’t directly act on this receptor, which is why they “feel” different from hallucinogens. Research into these compounds is even murkier: While early studies into MDMA have implicated serotonin in the drug’s effects, it’s only one chemical in a mixed bag of neurotransmitters and hormones.
Psilocybin may reduce the symptoms of anxiety and depression, especially in cancer patients when dealing with the existential crisis of death and coming to terms with the end of life. Psychedelic psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, is used in research to focus attention inward to encourage deep self-reflection and engaging in dialogue after the session is over.
Ayahuasca is native to South America and is used in traditional spiritual ceremonies. It contains the powerful psychoactive compound DMT and may help reduce problematic substance abuse by helping promote personal or spiritual insights or self awareness and growth emotionally or increase anxiety.
DEPRESSION was considered to be a result of low levels of serotonin in the brain has been challenged. An international team of scientists led by Joanna Moncrieff of University College London found no convincing evidence that lower levels of serotonin caused or were even associated with depression. Genetic studies seemed to rule out any connection between genes affecting serotonin levels and depression, even when the researchers tried to consider stress as a possible cofactor.
When psychiatrists evaluated populations of patients with chronic inflammatory diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, they’ve found that “all of them have higher-than-average rates of depression,” said neuropsychiatrist Charles Nemeroff at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. Of course, knowing that they have an incurable, degenerative condition may contribute to a patient’s depressed feelings, but the researchers suspect that the inflammation itself is also a large factor.
INFLAMMATORY RESPONSE Your gut flora is sending signals to the immune system. Dr. Gundry says it’s like your body sending text messages. They inform your immune system to get ready to fight intruders. How your gut and you respond to these messages are based on your genetic variables. https://drgundry.com/lectin-guide.
Medical researchers have found that inducing inflammation in certain patients can trigger depression. Interferon alpha, which is sometimes used to treat chronic hepatitis C and other conditions, causes a major inflammatory response throughout the body by flooding the immune system with proteins known as cytokines, molecules that facilitate reactions ranging from mild swelling to septic shock. The sudden influx of inflammatory cytokines leads to appetite loss, fatigue and a slowdown in mental and physical activity which are all symptoms of major depression. Patients taking interferon often report feeling suddenly, sometimes severely, depressed.
Autoimmune disorders, bacterial infections, high stress and certain viruses, including the virus that causes Covid, can all induce persistent inflammatory reaction. Increasingly, some scientists are pushing to reframe “depression” as an umbrella term for a suite of related conditions, much as oncologists now think of “cancer” as referring to a legion of distinct but similar malignancies. And just as each cancer needs to be prevented or treated in ways relevant to its origin, treatments for depression may need to be tailored to the individual.