I see a lot of cynicism toward systemic critiques that are perceived as being levied to support psychedelics against the conventions of modern science or medical practice. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but since a young age, it has been clear to me that the system 1/ 🧵 of mental health research and care delivery is woefully out of touch with the needs of the people it claims to serve, and that while modern science has indeed delivered many breakthroughs and advances (who could question this?), it often operates in service of maintaining 2/

The overlays between anti-psychiatry and anti-medicalized psychedelics are striking and would be a great subject for medical anthropologists. I haven’t seen anything written on this but you can watch it in real time on twitter. 1/ There are two threads to this: first, there is the anti-psych drugs attitude with an implicit or explicit argument that psychedelics are just the latest in evil, ineffective drug treatments. I was astounded to see Allen Frances post this today. But it also crops up in 2/

Short pharmacology 🧵 re MDMA. Someone is talking about SSRI-MDMA interactions. It's a very interesting example of some amazing research on monoaminergic transmission largely by Michael Baumann at NIDA. The gist is that monoamines like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine 1/ aren't only release into the synaptic cleft by vesicular fusion with the cell membrane, but that they also follow a concentration gradient (ie, high to low). Part of this diffusion is via the monoamine symporters that we usually think of in psychiatry as reuptake pumps. 2/

Antonin Artaud wrote about the theater, but his ideas had far reaching impacts on thought with eventual implications for psychedelics in the 1960s. The sterility of society, the banality of modernity, and the inescapable feeling that we were ignoring something big… 1/

… and all the whole focusing on only the most superficial and meaningless things… this joined with so many other strands of discontent in the counterculture and I would argue is alive and well, albeit in attenuated and sadly far more docile forms, in psychedelic 2/

The original Lukács essay—really, the whole book, History and Class Consciousness—is an unbelievable intellectual achievement. Reification is an insidious, potent, and unappreciated force that is extremely relevant to medicine, and especially to psychiatry. 1/

https://twitter.com/_Eric_Reinhart/status/1666888573830717449

According to Lukács, capitalist systems isolate facts, stripping them of context, assigning them to isolated specialities that have no hope of ever being possibly able to comprehend the whole. The goal is always “abstract and rational”: ie, anti-worker and anti-humanity. 2/

Interesting piece by ⁦@shayla__love⁩ that critiques certain problematic aspects of wellness culture as seen in ketamine clinics. Aside from observing the aesthetic cues that show marketing to bourgeois customers, a focus is made on the paradoxical 1/ harpersbazaar.com/beauty/a439204… fact that the wellness aesthetic is rather undergirded by ideals of holism and natural remedies, and opposed to mainstream medicine… yet ketamine is synthetic & medical as it gets. I think this actually raises a deeper philosophical issue that remains unexplored in the world 2/