Summary
There is a particular kind of book that can only be written late in one’s career or at a critical juncture in one’s profession.
Highlights
id1011711973
He invokes Moncrieff’s distinction between a disease-centered model of drug action (the drug corrects an etiological cause, like an antibiotic) and a drug-centered model (the drug produces psychoactive effects that provide symptomatic relief, like a shot of whiskey).
Buenísima distinción conceptual. Muy útil para comunicar de manera relativamente intuitiva el modelo naive de acción de los psicofármacos.
id1011715126
Non-specificity of psychiatric medications. No existing psychiatric medication is specific to any DSM diagnosis. Antipsychotics work across schizophrenia, mania, psychotic depression, severe anxiety, and agitation. Antidepressants work in depression, panic disorder, OCD, and anxiety. Lithium works in bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, augments antidepressant treatment, and helps in episodic aggression. The penicillin analogy (a drug that specifically targets a defined pathological process) is fundamentally misleading for psychotropic drugs. These are compounds that alter basic neurochemical systems involved in mood, arousal, salience, and reward, and their effects cascade (rather unpredictably) across multiple domains.
Importante principio sobre los efectos de los psicofármacos. No se cumple la lógica de la penicillins.
id1011715522
Drug-centered rather than disease-centered drug action. Drugs produce psychoactive effects that may provide symptomatic relief, rather than correcting biochemical abnormalities. No psychiatric disorder has a confirmed biochemical etiology that the relevant drug class corrects.
Refuerza la misma idea de una nota anterior