PsychiatricDrugs.com is a website about neuropsychopharmacology, trying to answer how pharmaceuticals used to treat psychiatric disorders work and affect the brain. It’s a site still under construction, but the long-term goal is to develop it into a psychotropic knowledge repository, with in-depth articles aimed at healthcare professionals. The articles will cover the brain and its most important neurotransmitters, major psychiatric disorders, the various classes of psychiatric drugs and the individual psychiatric drugs themselves. That at least, was the aim. At the present, production is very slow.
At present only five articles have been published. These articles cover the monoamine neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine and histamine, and acetylcholine. Have a look at them to get a feel for how PsychiatricDrugs.com’s articles will look like and learn something new about these neurotransmitters while you’re at it.
Knowledge from neuroscience research holds great promise for enhancing our comprehension of mental illness and improving the treatments we provide. The fields of neurology, psychiatry and psychology will likely become even more overlapping in the future as we learn more. The brain is the most enigmatic organ in the human body, but as a result of modern research we’re not totally in the dark anymore either. A deeper understanding of neurobiology and pharmacology can already now greatly improve current prescription practices and care for patients with psychiatric disorders in need of medication.
All medical treatments should be evidence based if possible, but no hard evidence exist to tell us which drug will be best to use for a specific patient, just which psychiatric drugs can be used to treat certain diagnoses. There is no evidence that choosing a drug based on how the drug’s receptor-profile matches an individual patient’s symptoms or how its pharmacokinetics matches the patient’s genotype, but doing so makes intuitively sense if we wish to provide more individualized medicine. To do so requires more knowledge and making that knowledge more accessible is the ultimate purpose of this site.