Serotonergic hallucinogens and emerging targets for addiction pharmacotherapies.
The Psychiatric clinics of North America – June 01, 2012
Source: PubMed
Summary
Remarkably, certain hallucinogens show promise for addiction treatment without causing dependence themselves. Unlike typical drugs of abuse, these substances affect the brain's reward system without leading to addiction. This suggests a novel approach to treat various addictive, psychiatric, and existential disorders. They represent a significant shift in mental health care, offering a unique, non-addictive pathway for healing.
Abstract
Only time will tell if serotonergic hallucinogen-assisted psychotherapy treatment paradigms for SUDs will prove to be safe and effective in double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. If they are, they would truly constitute a novel psychopharmacologic-psychosocial treatment paradigm to treat addictive disorders, although the risk of adverse psychological events would have to be controlled through a careful screening process and the risk of misuse of the substances or developing use syndromes would have to be considered, although the overall risk would be low because, as mentioned, SHs are unlike all other drugs of abuse in that they do not appear to produce dependence syndromes. There effects on the NA and DA range from inhibition to slight activation, all this without producing addiction. The ability of these medicinal tools to treat a range of addictive, psychiatric, and existential disorders is remarkable in scope and possibility. They truly represent a potential paradigmatic shift within the field of psychiatry, too interesting to not explore further.