PSY-101
Biomedical Therapy and The Psychodynamic Approaches to Therapy Among the themes that we discussed during the past few weeks, the theme that interested me the most was the biomedical therapy where we talked about how to cure or decrease some psychological disorders using medications. It often happens to me when I’m in the bus, in the street or in any public place to see some people whom arms or other part of the body is shaking. Since I had no idea about the reason that leads to this weird behavior, I always thought that those people were crazy. In reality, those people are as mentally healthy as most of us are, and it’s “schizophrenia” that causes their shaking.Schizophrenia is due to too many neurons getting fire at the same time, and as a biomedical therapy to cure this disorder, therapist use a pill named “chlorpromazine” .It’s a dopamine blocker which role is to block dopamine receptors in order to prevent neurons from getting fire. Two third of the people who use this medicine get better and get rid of their disorder as long as they don’t stop taking the pills. When starting taking those pills, those people are lowering their dopamine level so their Homeostasis decreases and their brain gets used to that change. However, when they stop taking those pills, the homeostasis gets up and so does the dopamine. The previous symptoms then come back again even worse than what they used to be before taking the pills. The right way to stop taking this medicine is to start lowering the amount of pills step by step. One other interesting drug that we talked about is the Tricyclic drug that cures one of the most common psychological disorders, depression. Our mood is mostly controlled by serotonin. Serotonin is provided to our body through nutrition (monoacids). That’s why having a healthy diet is very important in having a good mood. In other terms if a person is not having enough proteins in his body, he won’t feel happy whatever drugs he or she is taking. However if the person is feeling so depressed, this tricyclic drugs may help. The Tricyclic block serotonin from coming back to the terminal button, so that it would go back to the neuron and fire it again which leads to a quicker and longer feeling of happiness. This drugs turn out to be efficient for about sixty percent of people using it, but it has a very bad side effect which is a weight gain of over twenty pounds. Using pills or