Fleet MaullThe Entrepreneur’s Zen Master

Dr. Andrew Weil on the Radical Responsibility Podcast with Dr. Fleet Maull. #plantmedicine

22 Jun 2023 · 1 min

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Dr. Andrew Weil explains why SSRIs can backfire: they boost serotonin short-term, but your brain adapts by making less serotonin and fewer receptors, leaving you worse off after a year. Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression works differently, producing lasting benefits from just a few doses without that downregulation trap.

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The serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors, which are the ones that are so widely used in psychiatric medicine, increase serotonin at neural junctions. That's a very different kind of action. And one of the problems with using drugs like that is if you give them, over time, the homeostatic reaction, the body is counteractive, so the body will begin making less serotonin and dropping serotonin receptors. If you keep people on these things for a year or more, they wind up being more depressed than they were to begin with, and it's very hard to get off off of them. I don't think anything of that sort happens with the psychedelics and also with the, say, the use of psilocybin and treating drug resistant depression. It's not something you take on a regular basis over long periods of time, can be relatively short exposures to it with very long lasting effects.