Neuropsychopharmacology

Neuropsychopharmacology, an interdisciplinary science related to psychopharmacology (how drugs affect the mind) and fundamental neuroscience, is the study of the neural mechanisms that drugs act upon to influence behavior. It entails research of mechanisms of neuropathology, pharmacodynamics (drug action), psychiatric illness, and states of consciousness. These studies are instigated at the detailed level involving neurotransmission/receptor activity, bio-chemical processes, and neural circuitry. Neuropsychopharmacology supersedes psychopharmacology in the areas of "how" and "why", and additionally addresses other issues of brain function. Accordingly, the clinical aspect of the field includes psychiatric (psychoactive) as well as neurologic (non-psychoactive) pharmacology-based treatments. Developments in neuropsychopharmacology may directly impact the studies of anxiety disorders, affective disorders, psychotic disorders, degenerative disorders, eating behavior, and sleep behavior.

Drugs such as opium, alcohol, and certain plants have been used for millennia by humans to ease suffering or change awareness, but until the modern scientific era nobody knew how these substances worked. The first half of the 20th century saw psychology and psychiatry as largely phenomenological, in that behaviors or themes which were observed in patients could often be correlated to a limited variety of factors such as childhood experience, inherited tendencies, or injury to specific brain areas. Models of mental function and dysfunction were based on such observations. Indeed, the behavioral branch of psychology dispensed altogether with what actually happened inside the brain, regarding most mental dysfunction as what could be dubbed as "software" errors. In the same era, the nervous system was progressively being studied at the microscopic and chemical level, but there was virtually no mutual benefit with clinical fields—until several developments after World War II began to bring them together. Neuropsychopharmacology may be regarded to have begun in the earlier 1950s with the discovery of drugs such as MAO inhibitors, tricyclic antidepressants, thorazine and lithium which showed some clinical specificity for mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia. Until that time, treatments that actually targeted these complex illnesses were practically non-existent. The prominent methods which could directly affect brain circuitry and neurotransmitter levels were the pre-frontal lobotomy, and electroconvulsive therapy, the latter of which was conducted without muscle relaxants which often caused the patient great physical injury.

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