High on Drugs

On Prozac, Sisyphus might well push the boulder back up the mountain with more enthusiasm and more creativity. I do not want to deny the benefits of psychoactive medication. I just want to point out that Sisyphus is not a patient with a mental health problem. To see him as a patient with a mental health problem is to ignore certain larger aspects of his predicament connected to boulders, mountains, and eternity. 

Biological psychiatry, with its claim to an expanding number of psychiatric brain diseases requiring medical treatment, has fundamentally redefined the meanings we attach to our own feelings. In this last chapter I will consider some of the disturbing cultural implications of psychiatry s new pill paradigm.  

The best evidence we have at the moment is that schizophrenia, major depression, and manic depression have significant biological components. Although scientists have not been able to determine the exact role of 

Yet to stop at that model, to say that mental illness is nothing but disease, is like saying that an opeta is nothing but musical notes. It impovetishes us. It impoverishes out sense of human possibility.  

As I write these words, well past America s victory in Iraq, our government and the soldiers on the ground are still trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi peo- 

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Such a parabolic relation has the following incidence on drug delivery a molecule with a low partition coefficient will partition slowly from water into a lipid membrane. If the receptor is within or beyond that membrane, such a molecule will have a low probability of reaching it in the time interval under study. Conversely, molecules which are highly lipophilic will readily partition into the first of a series of lipid membranes, but will be held there and thus slowed down in their random walk to their site of action. Hence, optimal transport conditions are clearly achieved by drugs of intermediate partition coefficient, with no transfer step being too low. 

Consistent with these observations, there is some evidence that caffeine may act, in part, on dopaminergic fibers that project into the medial forebrain bundle. Other psychostimulants also appear to act on this system, which may be at least one of the neural mechanisms involved in the development of dependence.271 Further work has suggested a parallel between caffeine and another highly addictive drug, alcohol. Many of the same factors that enter into the development of alcoholism may also influence the development of dependence on caffeine.272... 

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