“The question of what would drive someone to destroy their life with drugs or alcohol was one of the early drivers for my interest in addiction psychiatry.”

lets see if we can break this down.

All information processing systems are basically the same. In the case of transistors, we use what are basically looping circuits, these run at a specific frequency in order to perform their task. With neurons, it’s pretty much exactly the same, it comes down to on/off (firing) and the frequency at which they fire in a particular looping ‘circuit’ which we call a neural network.

In this case neurons use what are called neurotransmitters to communicate, these molecules basically control the frequency at which the neurons fire. These systems have Feedback Mechanisms in them which are absolutely required to process information properly. Look at it this way, in order to push a boulder up a ramp one must know how far to push and with exactly how much force. One must know the angle of the ramp to determine how to apply force. How can neurotransmitters regulate anything between two neurons unless they know how much is being released and how much is being received?

Problem for alcoholics: Alcohol binds to GABA receptors and basically amplifies the degree of activation of these receptors. GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter and basically reduces likelihood of firing. Also, Glutamate is are also occupied by Ethanol and they are blocked from activation.

What happens: With chronic application, feedback mechanism try to overcome the disruption to allow normal information processing to occur again. Feedback absolutely does not merely meet the drugs, but overcomes their effect (by mechanism) with now an opposite problem.

In this case GABA receptors are deleted or uncoupled to lower GABA receptor activation. Glutamate receptors increase in density to overcome blockade and free new receptors for glutamate to bind to. There are a number of other mechanisms that change as well, but lets focous on these.

The alcoholic now needs to drink more to get the same effect, and when he doesn’t drink, the feedback that overcame the presence of alcohol now runs unopposed and MAN is that unpleasant alcohol withdrawal. When are alcoholic friend drinks, information processing is still disturbed by these feedback mechanisms, which are preventing even the presence of the alcohol from normalizing function. Thus, our alcoholic is basically losing the ability of his brain to properly process information whether or not he drinks.

So our alcholic bites the bullet and stops drinking. The feedback mechanisms can now run in reverse and begin to go back to the original receptor densities. Problem is, information processing was disturbed for awhile, perhaps his brain’s neural networking has learned incorrect or error ridden things (by neuron connections) during the period of uncorrected alteration in the frequency of the neurons running his information processing organ.

We can look at it this way, instead of making subjective interpretations of perhaps incomprehensible behavior, we can instead measure the degree of disruption of information processing with a QEEG, and then rule out the potential causes of disruption (such as drugs, or glucose energy metabolism problems) using PET scans.

What does it mean? it means all psychotropic drugs are going to potentate feedback mechanisms and eventually harm the patient by producing cognitive and/or psychiatric problems with chronic use making it impossible to differentiate drug induced problems from an underlying problem. Research must actually be made into the cause of mental illness, not using psychotropic drugs. Currently QEEGs are basically useless because most published information is from studies where already medicated patients were tested with unknown premedicated readings which throws the results into the area of scientifically incomprehensible.

If someone wants to be a psychiatrist, you should tell them to instead become a researcher. In my home county of the USA, according to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) 49 percent of the population is on at least one psychotropic drug. There are 100,000 deaths every year as of 2008 due to psychotropic drug side effects. We have enough psychiatrists. We need actual research of something that’s not purely subjective like the occurrence of a behavior called ‘gambling’.