Thanks Richard. That’s a great point, I agree, it’s not always clear and in many cases may not even be a meaningful question to ask. To elaborate, here’s what I hand in mind when I wrote that. Moncrieff only seems to consider two sorts of mechanisms: acting on physiological mechanisms vs psychoactive effects masking symptoms (or distract…
Thanks Richard. That’s a great point, I agree, it’s not always clear and in many cases may not even be a meaningful question to ask. To elaborate, here’s what I hand in mind when I wrote that. Moncrieff only seems to consider two sorts of mechanisms: acting on physiological mechanisms vs psychoactive effects masking symptoms (or distracting you from them, etc). She cannot seem to recognize that medications may have psychological effects that can interact with psychological mechanisms. I’m thinking of hypotheses such as antipsychotics targeting brain prediction errors or facilitating extinction learning of delusions, or psychedelics changing the “weighting of priors” or changing beliefs about self & the world, etc. Interactions of a quite different sort than alcohol drowning your sorrows.
Yes! I think that at the least tho she sets a helpful challenge: we can sometimes distinguish between masking/distraction and effects on the constitutive processes of the system itself (though if we start to think auto-poetically a la de Haan then things rightly get more complex), so if anyone wants to argue that their drug is doing more than masking they should actually demonstrate it. The drug effects you mention are fairly specific; the drug effects she suggests are very general so will show up in other domains too; whether the effects outlive the half-life will I imagine be an important deciding factor.
Thanks Richard. That’s a great point, I agree, it’s not always clear and in many cases may not even be a meaningful question to ask. To elaborate, here’s what I hand in mind when I wrote that. Moncrieff only seems to consider two sorts of mechanisms: acting on physiological mechanisms vs psychoactive effects masking symptoms (or distracting you from them, etc). She cannot seem to recognize that medications may have psychological effects that can interact with psychological mechanisms. I’m thinking of hypotheses such as antipsychotics targeting brain prediction errors or facilitating extinction learning of delusions, or psychedelics changing the “weighting of priors” or changing beliefs about self & the world, etc. Interactions of a quite different sort than alcohol drowning your sorrows.
Yes! I think that at the least tho she sets a helpful challenge: we can sometimes distinguish between masking/distraction and effects on the constitutive processes of the system itself (though if we start to think auto-poetically a la de Haan then things rightly get more complex), so if anyone wants to argue that their drug is doing more than masking they should actually demonstrate it. The drug effects you mention are fairly specific; the drug effects she suggests are very general so will show up in other domains too; whether the effects outlive the half-life will I imagine be an important deciding factor.