Talk:Neuropsychopharmacology

Lehession (talk) 02:47, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Metabolic pathway diagram
If anyone thinks the diagram needs something changed, please place comment here.--RichG 10:12, 31 October 2005 (UTC) The same goes for the diagram of melatonin production. _TOC_

Continuation of response to User:alteripse
You’re right that a map can be created for any subject, and scale is the critical factor. “Shoe-horning” detail into this article is not easy. There is, however, a difference with topics like physics and medicine – they have been around long enough to have extremely well defined components and boundaries. The retrospect of such topics makes for a much more easily catagorized article. In answer to the "pharmacology" article (which, incidently needs more info about principles and possibly a separated article on "list of medications": Pharmacology is mostly what I condider a "closed" subject (except for the medications themselves) - the major aspects of drug disposition, pharmacokinetics, the basics of pharmacodynamics, are all well established and slowly evolving if at all. There is no need to refer to journals in that article. In a subject like neuropsychopharmacology, though, much of what is known is in a state of disarray. In principle, if lab research were to stop today, the field could still continue for some time purely based on analysis of existing data. That is why I think the journals are so important. An article like Molecular nanotechnology should and does refer to journal articles (I think it should actually link to more journals). Anyhow, not to get too wound up over the journal issue, I do see your point that it is overstretching to make sub-section out of a journal as I have done.

Back to the article at hand, please bear with me while I elaborate. Early in the article, I gave some thought to categorization. The main two possibilities seemed to be something like organization by clinical topic (diseases etc.) or organization by technical topic (neurochemical etc.). Either way will involve some level of “mish-mash”. Clinical topic organization would continually refer to neural details which would not have been formally presented. Well, a point I was trying to make in the article is that only relatively recently does the formalism underlying psychiatric and mental study begin to have a basis which places these on par with other ‘’hard sciences’’. By analogy, if you wanted to fix or re-design a television set, you’ll need the schematic or else you’re just tinkering. Neuropsychopharmacology is finding the “schematic of the brain”, but also the principles analogous to component design as well.

All of the “hard sciences” tend to present material in the logical heirarchy of technical knowledge, with examples or applications interspersed along the way where appropriate. I decided to treat the subject more like the hard science it is becoming. I like the idea that one day humans may be able to write a technical manual for the human mind, and this is partly what I meant by “flavor”.

But forget about “flavor”, let’s talk mapping. From what I gather, the major sub-topics of neuropsychopharmacology are something like: Neurotransmitters, Receptors, Investigational tools, Gene transcription, Anxiety disorders, Affective disorders, Psychotic disorders, Degenerative disorders, Sleep and Anesthesia, Eating behavior, Future direction. Activities are drug development, and assorted fundamental research activities, each of which typically adds a mere incremental fraction to collective knowledge. These could be sub-categorized into slice methods, patch-clamp methods, genetic methods, I don’t know what else.

Perhaps it would be technically more appropriate to go ahead and catagorize the article that way, but I felt that even that would make the article too long. Again, with regards to the scope of the field, the ACNP 4th generation of progress compilation has a chapter “Introduction to pre-clinical neuropsychopharmacology” which is a very nice intro-type article, and comprehensive, too. But it is rather lengthy (by wiki standards), highly presuppositional, quite dense, and still does not provide any of the details which are precisely what the remainder of the compilation is to render.

So I currently have:
 * History
 * Overview (Investigational tools, degenerative disorders)
 * Neurotransmission (neurotransmitters, receptors, gene transcription)
 * Drugs (drug development, future direction)
 * Neural circuitry (more example oriented: sleep, psychosis (hallucination aspect))
 * Research

There is currently nothing about eating behavior or anesthetics. I’m wary that there may not be enough detail about degenerative disorders, though I mentioned three of them and briefly discussed relevant developments. I believe that the research section could de-emphasize journals and cover some of the actual methods like the patch-clamp.

I did not think this all through so rigorously when I began writing, but now having done so, it should be easier to identify flaws or deficits in this approach.--RichG 12:06, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

All of this makes excellent sense and is exactly what I was suggesting. Thanks for taking it constructively. As you can see from what I have written, I am no opponent of long articles, or of detail. But from long experience, when someone says "this field is too complicated for me to summarize", the statement tells you more about his ability to grasp or communicate the field than the subject matter. Now you are convincing me you understand this and I think this is the beginning of a great article. alteripse 13:23, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Hungarian Journal
I think the Hungarian journal might be the first journal entitled neuropsychopharmacology, but I'm not sure. The ACNP has met yearly since ~1962 but their journal didn't start until around 1995.--RichG 12:06, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Psychiatric Medications
As far as I can make out: the term 'Psychiatric Medications' is a sales and marketing neologism. Thanks no doubt, to that innovative genius Edward Bernays who became pretty big in developing pharmaceutical marketing strategies. It did not arise out of clinical practice. These types of drugs (listed in that article) treat symptoms and thus are not specific to any diagnostic category. I don't think I am being pedantic here, because it is part of the root to much miss understanding. Therefore I am disappointed to find an article by such a name. To my mind it will be impossible to develop (that article) without including all the factual inexactitudes and all the non sequiturs necessary to holding the illusion together. It is not encyclopaedic. The structure of 'chemical treatments throughout medicine -on Wikipedia- has to be clear, it needs to be rational... What do other editors think? --Aspro 21:44, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Psychiatric medications treat symptoms of mental illness in the same way that antibiotics, for example, treat symptoms of bacterial infection. The term "psychiatric medication" is obviously a neologism - but it did in fact arise out of clinical practice around the time of the appearance and widespread use of tricyclic antidepressants. You speak of Bernays (and thus, propaganda) but you mysteriously omit the fact that Bernays was himself a Freudian propagandist. You are not being pedantic; you are simply stating your (minority) point of view. That's fine, but does not warrant altering the article. Myrkkyhammas (talk) 07:13, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Drugs -- brain damage section references retracted study
Illicit drug-induced damage can be studied with greater accuracy - for example, it is now known that the 3 prototype hallucinogens PCP, LSD, and MDMA can cause possibly permanent damage[10] -- This paragraph references a paper based on a retracted study due to the fact that Ricaurte was injecting the monkeys with methamphetamine instead of MDMA. Also, the paper makes no mention of LSD causing brain damage despite its mention of HPPD. As far as I know, to date there have been no studies proving any brain damage caused by LSD. --Thoric 17:10, 13 July 2006 (UTC) If you'd like to read the paper, it's available here: C108_1545-1556.pdf

Overview Section
Student here - while I agree with the reasoning in the first paragraph of the overview section, I am not aware of any source for this content. This leads me to believe that this material is based on the authors opinions. As it is my understanding that wikipedia articles are supposed to remain unbiased, this section should be removed or cited. Btravers (talk) 03:15, 25 January 2017 (UTC)