Psychoanalysis used to hold a critical, reductive approach towards religion. Lately, however, one can find two other approaches: adaptive and transformative. An “adaptive” psychoanalytic approach to spirituality, described in this chapter, refers to the spiritual experience as any kind of human experience, which psychoanalysis can improve and intensify. Psychoanalysis, in this sense, is not...
A central question in neuroscience is how consciousness arises from the dynamic interplay of brain structure and function. Here we decompose functional MRI signals from pathological and pharmacologically-induced perturbations of consciousness into distributed patterns of structure-function dependence across scales: the harmonic modes of the human structural connectome. We show that...
No single effective therapy for alcohol abuse has been found, despite it being a serious sociological and economic problem for hundreds of years. It seems difficult to find a single drug as a panacea for the alcohol problem due to the complexity of the pathophysiology of alcohol dependence. The purpose of this narrative review is to review existing and potentially future pharmaceuticals for the...
For decades, ibogaine─the main psychoactive alkaloid found in Tabernanthe iboga─has been investigated as a possible treatment for substance use disorders (SUDs) due to its purported ability to interrupt the addictive properties of multiple drugs of abuse. Of the numerous pharmacological actions of ibogaine and its derivatives, the inhibition of α3β4 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs),...
Objective Classic psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, and peyote/mescaline) have been used to support addiction treatment in a variety of contexts ranging from ceremonial use to clinical trials. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that past naturalistic use of classic psychedelics would be associated with decreased prevalence of substance use disorder, when controlling for known...
medRxivJanuary 6, 2023Annika Rosenthal, Maria Garbusow, Nina Romanczuk-Seiferth et al.
preprint
Pavlovian conditioned contextual cues have been suggested to modulate instrumental action and might explain maladaptive behavior such as relapse in patients suffering from alcohol use disorder (AUD). Pavlovian-to Instrumental transfer (PIT) experimentally assesses the magnitude of this context-dependent effect and studies have shown a larger PIT effect in AUD populations. Taken this into...
Introduction: Psilocybin (the active compound found in “magic mushrooms”) has been an area of recent focus in the academic and psychiatric community on account of its potential in treating a spectrum of substance use and concurrent disorders (SUCDs). This paper posits a literature review of the current research pertaining to psilocybin in treating alcohol use disorder (AUD) through a form of...
Yoga Mimamsa2023Atmika Ramsahaye, B. Bharathi, K. Sasidharan et al.
Introduction: Research evidence and theoretical models point to the need to implement yoga and mindfulness interventions as they impact different physiological and psychological functioning associated with addiction and relapse. To ensure the safe application of yoga, a standardized yoga module that can be practiced across any drug type of substance addiction is required. This study focuses on...
Psychotropic drugs and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are effective for treating certain psychiatric conditions. Drugs and TMS have also been used as tools to explore the relationship between brain function and behavior in humans. Combining centrally acting drugs and TMS has proven useful for characterizing the neural basis of movement. This combined intervention approach also holds...
Sleep disturbance is one of the most prominent complaints of patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD), with more than 70% of patients with AUD reporting an inability to resolve sleep problems during abstinence. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) has been shown to improve sleep quality and as an alternative therapy to hypnotics for sleep disorders. The aim of the present study was to...