For 3000 years, psychedelics have been used in religious contexts to enhance spiritual thinking, well-being, and a sense of community. In the last few years, a renaissance in the use of psychedelic drugs for mental disorders has occurred in Western society; consequently, a pressing scientific need to elucidate the intricate mechanisms underlying their actions has arisen. Psychedelics mainly...
Esketamine is a version of ketamine that has been approved for treatment-resistant depression, but our previous studies showed a link between non-medical use of ketamine and brain structural and functional alterations, including dorsal prefrontal grey matter reduction among chronic ketamine users. In this study, we sought to determine cortical thickness abnormalities following long-term,...
The intricate interplay between peripheral adaptive immune cells and the central nervous system (CNS) has garnered increasing recognition. Given that alterations in cell quantities often translate into modifications in metabolite profiles and that these metabolic changes can potentially traverse the bloodstream and enter the CNS, thereby modulating the progression of mental illnesses, we sought...
A 35-year-old female hemodialysis (HD) patient with end-stage renal disease was able to successfully withdraw from benzodiazepines, which had been prescribed for managing psychiatric and pain symptoms, following a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) intervention. The patient, who had been
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) alleviates depression and anxiety in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, underlying therapeutic neural mechanisms and mindfulness-specific effects have yet to be elucidated. We randomly assigned adults with ASD to MBSR or social support/education (SE). They completed questionnaires that assessed depression, anxiety, mindfulness traits,...
In an interesting and timely editorial, Borgland and Neyens provide a snap shot of preclinical research that could support the development of psyche delic drugs as part of a therapeutic regimen in individuals with obesity or eating disorders (EDs), including an orexia nervosa (AN) and binge eating disorder (BED).1 The role of the sero tonergic system in appetite was key in the development...
There has been a substantial growth in private clinics and registered clinical trials employing serotonergic psychedelics for various psychiatric illnesses, including substance use disorder[1][1],[2][2] and major depressive disorder.[3][3]–[6][4] Classical psychedelics include lysergic acid
Background: Deficient regulation of stress plays an important role in the escalation of substance use, addiction and relapse. Accumulating evidence suggests dysregulations in cognitive and reward-related processes and the underlying neural circuitry in cannabis dependence. However, despite the important regulatory role of the endocannabinoid system in the stress response, associations between...
Increasing cannabis consumption among adolescents, studies that link its early use with mental illnesses, and the political debate on cannabis legalization together call for an urgent need to study molecular underpinnings of adolescent brain vulnerability. The emerging role of epigenetic mechanisms in psychiatric diseases led us to hypothesize that epigenetic alterations could play a role in...
Mindfulness-based treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have emerged as promising adjunctive or alternative intervention approaches. A scoping review of the literature on PTSD treatment studies, including approaches such as mindfulness-based stress reduction, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and metta mindfulness, reveals low attrition with medium to large effect sizes. We...
Background: Targeting the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) is a major translational approach for treating negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Ketamine comprehensively produces schizophrenia-like symptoms, such as positive, cognitive and negative symptoms in healthy volunteers. The amplitude of the mismatch negativity (MMN) is known to be significantly reduced not only in patients with...
The molecular mechanisms underlying major depressive disorder remain poorly understood, and current antidepressant treatments have many shortcomings. The recent discovery that a single intravenous infusion of ketamine at a subanesthetic dose had robust, rapid and sustained antidepressant effects in individuals with treatment-resistant depression inspired tremendous interest in investigating the...
A recent paper in the Archives of General Psychiatry confirms that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) “offers protection against relapse/recurrence on a par with that of maintenance antidepressant pharmacotherapy.”[1][1] It is a tribute to the accumulated wisdom of humankind that a
BACKGROUND Neurobiological findings and clinical data suggest that dissociative experience inhibits conditioning processes, but experimental studies are lacking. The aim of our study was to determine whether high states of dissociative experience would specifically alter emotional learning, but not declarative knowledge. METHODS We used an aversive differential delay conditioning procedure in...
OBJECTIVE: Patterns of successive saccades and fixations (scan paths) that are made while viewing images are often spatially restricted in schizophrenia, but the relation with cannabis-induced psychosis has not been examined. We used higher-order statistical methods to examine spatiotemporal characteristics of scan paths to determine whether viewing behaviour was distinguishable on a continuum....
This paperback publication has 428 pages of text, an additional 131 pages of references and an 18-page subject index. The text is organized in 10 chapters, each liberally endowed with relevant figures and tables. The first 3 chapters (72 pages) are very useful because they contain numerous definitions and introduce the reader to neuroscientific and pharmacological topics that appear throughout...