DA is for Dopamine

 

I'm taking this psychopharmacology class and it is driving me bonkers.  First of all, it was a stupid thing to do, to sign up for a class so heavily laden with chemistry for such a short term.

The other reason that it's driving me bonkers is because it's creating a whole new realm of questions in my head.  When I registered for this class, I had a very simplistic view of what it would be.  I thought, Oh, it will be "this drug does that, and that drug does this"  but that is NOT what this class is about.

This class is about:  These chemicals are neurotransmitters, and this is how reuptake works, and this is what dopamine does, and this is the actual process for how a neurotransmitter gets into and out of a vesicle, and this is a secondary messenger.  Oh, and let's also talk about knock out mice and transgenic mice, and what happens to them when you give them Huntington's disease and how that compares with wild-type mice who don't possess that gene.

As I read about all these intricate, wonderful processes that go on in our brains, I can't help but question what is happening in Logan's brain.  Maybe this isn't working right?  Maybe he doesn't have enough of this neurotransmitter?  Maybe these synapses aren't firing?  Maybe this other thing isn't working?  He's had an MRI, and his structure is fine, so it must be the process. The process isn't working.

And clearly, I don't know enough. None of us do.

Psychology, as much as it is my passion, is still very much in the dark ages.  We take a set of behaviors, and we observe if they cause impairment in functioning. We label the behaviors. And then we have a syndrome.  But we still cannot point to any mental disorder and say, Aha!  There!  That, specifically, is what causes depression!  Or mania!  Or schizophrenia! And the reason we can't do that is because while biology plays a role in any disorder we might develop, so does environment, and environment is not uniform across the human species.

It wasn't so very long ago that those with an mental illness were warehoused in asylums, lobotomized, given malaria (on purpose, to induce a fever), or sterilized against their will (because hey, we don't want to pass on those genes, right?) We've made enormous strides in the field since then, and coupled with neurology, and neuropsychology, and other sub fields, we can say that we know so much more than we did.

But we still don't know enough.

And I feel frustrated, because it took me so long to get here, it took me so long to understand that this is what I needed to do.  And if all I can do, at this stage of the game, is make people more aware, and educate people who might not have understood, then that's something, right?  That's a thing, right?