We spend a lot of time explaining psychiatric medications in terms of neurotransmitters and receptors, but that may be the wrong level of abstraction. In this episode, I argue that psychiatric illness is better understood as a problem of brain circuits and information processing, not low-level mechanisms like receptors, and that this helps explain why treatments like ECT and clozapine work when others don’t. We should instead investigate how medications affect actual brain functioning at a circuit-level, and to do that we will have to think beyond neurotransmitters.

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