This chapter discusses the case of a 46-year-old female with a 5-year history of distressing, unpleasant and bizarre dreams that occurred from a few times a week to once a month, depending on her stress level. It presents the clinical history, examination, diagnosis, follow-up, general remarks and the results of the procedures performed on the patient. Nocturnal polysomnography (PSG) was...
Psilocybin and related hallucinogenic compounds are increasingly used in human research. However, due to limited information about potential subjective side effects, the controlled medical use of these compounds has remained controversial. We therefore analysed acute, short- and long-term subjective effects of psilocybin in healthy humans by pooling raw data from eight double-blind...
Kim’s argument for a minimal physicalism breaks down in two critical places. First, his functional reduction of cognitive/intentional properties fails to do justice to what we mean when we refer to belief, desire and the like, because it fails to account for their referential and normative content. And although Kim believes that he is saving what is distinctive about our cognitive/intentional...
The cytotoxic effects and biotransformation of harmine and harmaline, which are known β-carboline alkaloids and potent hallucinogens, were studied in freshly isolated rat hepatocytes. The exposure of hepatocytes to harmine caused not only concentration (0-0.50mM)- and time (0-3h)-dependent cell death accompanied by the formation of cell blebs and the loss of cellular ATP, reduced glutathione,...
AddictionSeptember 15, 2010Carlo C. DiClemente6 citations
Mindfulness training has become an integral part of treatment approaches for a variety of behavioral and emotional problems. Brewer and colleagues 1 identify rumination and stress coping as potential common etiological components in major depression and substance abuse disorders and then speculate upon how mindfulness coping, specifically attention and acceptance, address these components and...
The paper by Brewer et al. [1] is based upon the assumption that there are common underlying mechanisms for depression and substance use disorders and the ambition is to provide a theoretical, clinical and neurobiological perspective that can frame the conceptualization and treatment of co-occurring depression and substance use disorders. The main starting point for this task is the meditation...
Changes in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) expression have been implicated in the etiology of psychiatric disorders. To investigate pathological mechanisms elicited by perturbed BDNF signaling, we examined mutant mice with central depletion of BDNF (BDNF(2L/2LCk-cre)). A severe impairment specific for the serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT(2A)R) in prefrontal cortex was described previously...
Journal of Psychoactive DrugsSeptember 2010Alecia Dager Schweinsburg, Brian C Schweinsburg, Krista Lisdahl Medina et al.
Some neurocognitive recovery occurs within a month of abstinence from heavy marijuana use, yet functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has revealed altered activation among recent and abstinent adult users. We compared fMRI response during a spatial working memory (SWM) task between adolescent marijuana users with brief and sustained durations of abstinence. Participants were 13 recent...
Previously, we reported that acute marijuana intoxication minimally affected complex cognitive performance of daily marijuana smokers. It is possible that the cognitive tests used were insensitive to marijuana-related cognitive effects. In the current study, electroencephalographic (EEG) signals were recorded as daily marijuana users performed additional tests of immediate working memory and...
On 30 October 2009, the home secretary in the UK asked David Nutt to resign from his post as chairman of the government's advisory council on the misuse of drugs. The previous day, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London had published Nutt's paper, ‘Estimating drug harms: a risky business?’. This is an edited version of his Eve Saville memorial lecture, delivered at...