The good news is that we know antidepressants can treat major depression, helping millions of people live healthier lives. The bad news is that we don’t really know how they do that. Check out the theories on how antidepressants work in this episode. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What are the current theories on how antidepressants work?
It gets out of whack and your blood pressure gets out of whack. And tyramine is present in a lot of different foods from like soy sauce to fish to sausage, aged cheese, the best cheese.
Yeah.
And as a matter of fact, it's called the cheese reaction, where people get hypertensive from taking MAOIs and accidentally eating the wrong food. So what the monoamines get broken down by is monoamine oxidase, MAO. And the MAOI is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
That's right.
So it prevents this thing from breaking down the monoamines. And that's why you can't eat aged cheese.
Do you think anyone ever goes in and they're like, can I just do the SSRIs because everyone kind of knows those?
Right.
Should we name check those?
I've never heard of any of them, but sure, if you want.
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Chapter 2: How prevalent is depression and what are its symptoms?
Yeah. Do you know what the dose was before I give this number?
I think it was like melt your face.
Half a bag?
Right.
Two handfuls. I'm very curious, but this is, I think it was a depression rating scale they were using where 24 was severe and seven or below was no depression. And before they had the psilocybin, they scored 22, an average of 22.8 out of 24, as far as being severely depressed. And then afterward, it went all the way down to 7.7, which is just a skosh above no depression.
Yeah, and that 7.7 was that follow-up a year later.
Yeah, that's remarkable.
Yeah, so that was 2022. I wonder if they check in with these people now what the scores will be. You know, do you have to take psilocybin every two years, twice over two weeks, and maintain control over depression? That's pretty amazing. There's another study from 2024 that found that psilocybin is at least as effective at treating MDD as SSRIs, probably more.
Yeah. And I think they did try to follow up with those people, but they got no self-service out there in Joshua Tree.
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