Questions tagged [psychopharmacology]
For questions about the scientific study of the effects of pharmaceutical and general drugs on perception, behavior, mood and cognition.
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Do stimulants increase the IQ tests score for everyone?
There is some meta-analytic evidence that stimulants increase the IQ test scores of ADHD children by 2 to 7 points (Jepsen et al., 2009).
Although giving stimulants to non-ADHD children may be ...
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Has it ever been quantified the extent to which “culture” influences specifically what kinds of research gets done?
I would like to know about a technique for showing rigorously and quantitatively the way in which certain kinds of scientific research (in psychology) never get done because of cultural reasons, for ...
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Why can some drugs make us hallucinate and think the hallucinations are reality?
The question above mainly applies to dramamine. I've only taken 1 tablet for carsickness, but I have read about experiences with that drug. I'm including other drugs that can make you hallucinate and ...
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Medical treatment for depression
Should depression be treated with excitatory or inhibitory medications?
Normally I have seen inhibitory drugs being prescribed for depression, hence my question.
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What can happen if a human takes SB-243213?
SB-243213 acts as a selective inverse agonist for the 5-HT2C receptor.
The 5-HT2C receptor is one of many 5-HT receptors which are receptors that bind serotonin, and seems to play a major role in ...
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Are there any circumstances where schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are not lifelong?
It is known that psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar I, and bipolar II are for life, and require long term treatment (lifelong).
Is this always the case?
The answer could include ...
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Can hallucinogens treat depressive states?
Given the serotonin hypothesis of depression, increasing synaptic serotonin level may cause anti-depressive effects.
Hallucinogens seems to have such advantages:
They improve mood at once, but not ...
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Could opiate addictions be treated with esterase inhibitors?
Since heroin is a prodrug (i.e inactive) and must be metabolized into morphine by certain esterase enzymes in order to produce psychoactive effects, would some esterase inhibitors theoretically ...
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Why are there substances that give positive psychological effects but become unhealthy addictions?
In a very general way, why is the brain a system that responds euphorically in response to certain stimulants yet over time that substance may be addictive and have negative health effects?
What is it ...
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Is there good evidence that long-term stimulant usage in children has no harmful effect when stopped?
Essentially, I am looking for an RCT done on children, where they went on a stimulant drug for at least 3 years, and then stopped administering the drug.
What I'm worried about is long-term lower ...
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Can the effectiveness of antidepressants be explained by a placebo effect?
A friend of mine showed me a paper (Kirsch, 2014) where the author claims that antidepressants work mostly through a placebo effect (backed up with relevant citations). Antidepressants are generally ...
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How do SSRIs work?
I've found a reasonable explanation on Wikipedia...
SSRIs are believed to increase the extracellular level of the neurotransmitter serotonin by inhibiting its reuptake into the presynaptic cell, ...
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Is there any medication which is molecularly similar to alcohol?
I have found alcohol to have beneficial and desirable effects on me, and I have been exploring the question of why alcohol is not given the same level of pharmaceutical legitimacy as other medicines ...
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Is it believed that ketamine has less side effects compared to SSRIs?
I was told that recent research shows that ketamine is equally effective to, and not more effective than, SSRIs when used as a regular medication, for example as a nasal spray.
However, is it believed ...
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Why do SSRIs take multiple weeks to reach their full effect?
What is it about SSRIs that they require 2-4 weeks for their long-term effect to become present?
Is this the result of small accumulations over time in some aspect of the brain?
Are there other ...
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Are self-reported depression scores from inpatient facilities used to measure the efficacy of different pharmaceuticals?
In the United States, patients with clinical depression are somtimes hospitalized for sucidal ideation or attempted suicide. It is common practice to prevent patients from discharging themselves from ...
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Are there methods of evaluating the effects of psychoactive drugs that use free-form verbal reports?
If one wished to study the effects of a psychoactive drug such as LSD, what strikes me as a natural primary starting point would be to ask participants what they actually experienced. For example, ...
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Evidence of cannabis exposure causing schizophrenia?
I've heard that cannabis exposure during teenage years increases the probability of developing schizophrenia-like symptoms later in life. What evidence is there that this is causal and not ...
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Does caffeine improve performance for habituated consumers?
I've seen a fair few studies over the while that suggest caffeine increases arousal in the short term and that for some tasks, this will also increase performance (there's a few citations here).
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Are many anticonvulsants just coincidentally also psychoactive?
Many of the antiseizure I'm aware of are described as having the potential for behavior altering side-effects. I am curious about this.
Is there something about the chemistry of the brain that ...
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Caffeine modulating substances in coffee
From personal experimentation I know that caffeine affects me differently than coffee. Are there any known caffeine modulating substances found in coffee?
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How to temporarily induce low latent inhibition?
As the Wikipedia article says,
High levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine (or its agonists) in the ventral tegmental area of the brain have been shown to decrease latent inhibition. Certain ...
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What are the pharmacodynamics (Ki nM) of the monoamine neurotransmitters?
Ok, so any psychoactive drug will have different affinities for different receptor types. For instance, sertraline has an extreme affinity for the SERT and very little affinity for the 5-HT1A receptor....
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How does the chemical structure of a drug determine potency?
I'm rather new to neuropharmacology, and I am particularly interested in why some psychotropic medications are more potent than others despite being in the same category of one another, (i.e.: ...
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"Reverse Tolerance" Hypothetical
Let me use Caffeine as an example for this question, because it's a classically understood case of drug tolerance.
Caffeine is an adenosine antagonist; it works by blocking the adenosine receptors in ...
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Mechanism of ketamine in treatment of depression and anxiety?
What are the mechanisms by which ketamine reduces the symptoms of depression and anxiety? E.g. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00088699.
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What is the size limit of molecules entering the intracellular sections of a neuron?
As voltage sensitive organic dyes enter the inside of neurons and quantum dots are seeking to replace these due to their higher quantum yield, I was wondering what the seize limit is, as quantum dot ...
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Any statistics on the likelihood of, consumption frequencies and dosages required for serotonin syndrome to occur with LSD?
This may be too obscure of a question to have sufficient, if any, statistics on it. If that's the case, any relevant information is appreciated.
From what I've gathered, very high doses and/or very ...
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What medication would best treat buspirone induced insomnia?
The anxiolytic buspirone causes insomnia in a small minority of patients. What existent medication would theoretically (or in practice) best treat this insomnia? Buspirone from my understanding is an ...
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Cannot find a journal paper on a study on caffeine, even though it is registered at clinicaltrials.gov
Can somebody help me find the following study:
Effects of Low Doses of Caffeine on Mood, Physiology and Mental Function, listed under trial identifier NCT00487227 on ClinicalTrials.gov.
It's a very ...
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What is meant by "serotonergic" in "serotonergic psychedelics"
"Serotonergic psychedelics" is apparently a sub-class of psychedelics. Now, I believed that the pharmacological definition of psychedelics is that they all agonise 5HT receptors, especially ...
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Is the oscillatory power inversely proportional to the frequency?
I'm trying to understand neuronal synchronization/desynchronization and oscillation, as well as the psychedelic state. The following sentence confused me a bit.
Psilocybin reduced spontaneous ...
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How do psychedelics work? [duplicate]
I realize my question is more of a pharmacological one than a neuroscientific one, but I didn't know where else to ask this question.
As far as I've read, there's two components to how psychedelics ...
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How to test whether THC or CBD gives a mental boost?
Studies have shown significant reduction in seizures in babies to adults when taking marijuana. I would call that amazing but what does it do in improving cognitive abilities in normal people?
...
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Are there any pragmatic uses of hallucinogens?
Hallucinogens (psilocybin, LSD and others) are often regarded as risky substances, therefore they are banned in most places.
Are there ways of using these substances that can be beneficial?
Or in ...
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How to take advantage of the withdrawal symptoms of antidopaminergics?
So this may be a stupid question as I am not trained in neuroscience or psychology at all, but I had an idea about a somewhat counterintuitive approach to psychotropics and was wondering whether if it ...
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Psilocybin for treatment of anxiety disorder
Has psilocybin been used for treatment of anxiety disorder? I've mostly found it used in the treatment of depression in patients diagnosed with cancer (Nichols et al. 2017) and patients not diagnosed ...
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Can LSD connect sensory regions in the brain?
How is it possible that after using LSD you can hear sounds and see colors?
I have my own experience with this phenomenon. When I´m lying totally relaxed in bed and suddenly a door is closed loudly, I ...
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Can anticholinergics like benztropine be used to treat Catatonia?
I found an old paper describing a case study where a catatonic patient was successfully treated with benztropine (Cogentin). However, I can't find any modern guidelines that calls for this treatment (...
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How can we eliminate the effect of psychiatric medication on neuropsychological research with schizophrenic patients?
It is delicate to conduct studies with schizophrenic patients, considering that the results may be altered by the medication factor. What strategies should be used to counteract this effect?
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LSD and tryptamines harmless or neurotoxic? [closed]
It's commonly stated by numerous people that LSD and trytamines like DMT and psilocin are physically harmless and not neurotoxic. Is there evidence for this?
I recently read 5-meo-Dipt which is a ...
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Applying psychoactive drugs locally
I wonder if there are approaches to apply psychoactive drugs (more) locally, e.g. by drug carriers.
Usually psychoactive drugs are taken orally/enterally and thus flood the brain unspecifically: each ...
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Predicting the individual effects of psychotropic drugs
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23796468/
I have searched the national library of medicine but I could not find any papers about predicting both the therapeutic and adverse effects on the ...
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Triptans and SSRIs
When talking about triptans used for migraines such as Zolimitriptan, such drugs are selective serotonin receptor agonists.
SSRIs, as their function states, are Selective Serotonin Reuptake ...
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Can SSRI make things worse in the long term or cause delayed depression?
I found two articles that mention that taking SSRI for depression can actually make the depression worse.
"Now Antidepressant-Induced Chronic Depression Has a Name: Tardive Dysphoria" on Psychology ...
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Are neural adaptation and drug tolerance to psychoactive drugs related?
Neural adaptation is "...a change over time in the responsiveness of the sensory system to a constant stimulus". The example given is placing your hand on the surface of a table. Eventually, you no ...
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When the DEA says a drug is X times more potent than another, what do they mean?
E.g.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 80-100 times stronger than morphine.
What does that refer to?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potency_(pharmacology):
The IUPHAR has ...
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Are there ways to accelerate the recovery from depression via novel pharmacological antidepressants?
Are there any scientists making substantial progress in the development of far more effective antidepressants? Are there any groups of people interested in developing antidepressants based on genetic ...
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Ritalin for treating attention and lack of focus in depression
I’d like to know if there’s research about the use of ritalin for treating attention deficit in Major Depression Disorder.
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Is there any empirical support to "chemical imbalance theory" for mental illness?
Has it been proved by measurement of chemicals in the brain that psychiatric disorders have either their origin or continuance due to chemical imbalance in the brain? I saw the documentary Diagnostic &...
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