Psychopharmacology: What Is It?
Report from the Mind-Meds.com NY [New York] office about psychopharmacology
Pharmacology, for starters, is the science of medication. In one form or another, both pharmacology and its offspring, psychopharmacology, have been with us since the ‘dawn’ of civilization. Next to hunting (and prostitution), psychopharmacology may be among the world’s oldest professions.
Finding substances that relieved pain and reduced symptoms of various disorders is a pursuit that is as old as human history (at least since Adam was tossed out of the Garden of Eden.) The elimination of pain and suffering has been a major focus of our civilization for thousands of years.
The very first psychopharmacologists were the leaf- and root-gatherers, who in their search for edibles also found plants that could dramatically impact the course and consequence of medical illness. Most every civilization has had its own breed of healers, shamans, and doctors who offered the best of what they could find to heal sickness and sometimes promote their reputation among their kind.
The ‘ancients’, by whom we refer to the early Greeks and Romans, had their own kind of psychopharmacology. Some of their beliefs and medical practices survived right on up to the Middle Ages. A very popular notion was that disorders of mind and mood—in women—were caused by the so-called hysteros, or ‘wandering uterus.’ The term survives as the adjective ‘hysterical’, referring to people (again, usually women) who are very demonstrative when expressing their pain and anxiety. This explanation of disease has never been popular among feminists, I might add…
Another outdated psychopharmacological theory relates to the four so-called ‘humours’ (= hormones.) According to this school of thought, our personalities resulted from a particular mix of each of the four humors in the body. These were black bile (too much caused depression); phlegm (too much caused you to be slow, or phlegmatic); yellow bile (a common cause of jealousy); and choler (which very angry people had too much.)
Funny but true: modern-day psychopharmacology took a very similar approach to the understanding of mental illness and personality. Thirty years ago psychopharmacologists were explaining most of human behavior on the basis of four—that’s right, four—neurotransmitters. These were dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and acetylcholine. Brain research has amply demonstrated that each of these brain chemicals is indeed involved in specific and different facets of behavior.
Over the succeeding decades, the original neurotransmitter scheme has been significantly modified, in the direction of appreciating a much greater complexity of the central nervous system. For example, brain scientists now know that individual neurons handle more than one neurotransmitter at a time. Also, neuroscientists and psychopharmacologists are certain that the brain works by means of perhaps dozens of essential transmitters, including endorphins, enkephalins, gamma-amino butyric acid, glutamate, and others.
Thirty years ago, modern psychopharmacology was in its infancy. At that time, when psychiatrists and other mind healers called themselves ‘psychopharmacologists’, some of us would look the other way in shame. I say this because doctors are acutely aware of the keen hunger patients have for tidy explanations of their illness. Ill-intentioned or eager to please practitioners have jumped at the chance of offering their patients a neat take-home explanation for mental illness, involving a four-component model of neurotransmitter deficit or excess. We now know that the human still defies complete understanding, and that neurotransmitters are only part of the story. The part of the story that remains to be told will no doubt be more fascinating than ever.