Andrew Huberman· PhD
And my understanding is that the SSRIs are powerfully effective for certain forms of obsessive compulsive disorder and may also be effective for treatment of depression, but it may again be through some effect unrelated to serotonin itself. Is that right? And how should we think about SSRIs? Are they useful, are they not useful? What's going on with SSRIs in your patients and in other people as well? - Yeah, so the experiment that I described a bit ago around the naltrexone and ketamine was the first time I'm aware of where we were able to essentially eliminate an antidepressant's effect by using a second drug as a kind of a blockade. And it highlights a bigger issue, right? The issue that we haven't had a good way of really understanding how these drugs work. And so it's the difference. I think a lot of the controversy there is that it's been been difficult, I think, for folks to see that something can on one hand work and on the other hand, we don't know how it works, right? And so SSRIs clearly work. You know, many, many meta analyses kind of proving that out, right? That in a subpopulation of individuals, they achieve great benefit from depression, you know, for depression, for obsessive compulsive disorder, for generalized anxiety disorder, panic, you know, all these things, you can see an improvement in those symptoms with what we call SSRIs or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.