Milligrams

An interesting thought from McManamy:

All our current psychiatric meds are the result of serendipitous discovery, based on old technologies. They get some of the people somewhat better some of the time, and we have no idea why. The drug industry made vast sums of money essentially putting old pills in new bottles. That era is just about over.

The new era would involve finding the precise illness pathways that cause specific mental illness symptoms and figuring out which gene variations are involved. Forget about a treatment for all of depression. Rather, it might be more productive to uncover the underlying mechanisms to, say, lack of motivation. Maybe only a small percentage of depressions involve lack of motivation. But maybe such a drug would get a lot of these people a lot better a lot of the time.

I wonder whether this dovetails with brain enhancement drugs such as Progivil and Adderall, because those two drugs certainly treat “lack of motivation,” although not sustainably. In any case, an intriguing idea about the future of medication. I suspect, however, that we’ll remain in the Dark Ages of “serendipitous discovery” for a little while longer…