The Power of Neurobiochemistry

The mind is what the brain does

It is impossible to imagine what it is like to suffer from a mental illness without having briefly touched the limits of the fragile condition we call sanity (Credit: Sam Harris). Therefore, let’s embark on a thought experiment.

Imagine that there was a country where MDMA is legal and in a couple of days you will be taking MDMA for the first time. Let the days before this legal experience represent your baseline in terms of how you normally feel.

Judgment day arrives and you lawfully pop the pill.

After around 90 minutes or so, you are coming up. Your neurobiochemistry changes and your thoughts and outlooks on life follow suit. You feel invincible, euphoric, and grateful to be alive. Pure love for yourself and others. An upward shift in valence by many orders of magnitude from your normal baseline.

Many of your problems disappear. It is not that you do not remember them. No, you are quite lucid and very aware of them. However, now -full of energy, motivation, and euphoria- you view these problems through a different lens. You even see putative solutions and you are eager to tackle them in the future. The “what is” did not change, but the “how you see it” did.

Let’s fast forward 48h, a time when your monoamine stores have been depleted. Your neurobiochemistry has changed again, but now in the opposite direction. Now you are depressed. You start to cry for seemingly no reason. You feel empty and ask: “What is the point?”

Welcome to Suicide Tuesday.

You are educated about how MDMA works, and you know exactly what is happening neurobiologically. Yet, you are carried away by the underlying emotional tone. Your subjective experience is too intense, visceral, and raw. Talking yourself out of your sadness by telling yourself “This is biology.” is useless. Sometimes it does not matter what you know, but what you feel takes over.

The above is only a fraction of the article. This article is currently undergoing final revisions and is expected to be published within the next few weeks to months. To receive a notification upon its release, sign up for my newsletter.