Charles Raison, MD
Saturday, November 16th, 2024
10:30 AM – 12:00PM
UCLA Luskin Center
Psychiatry has long distrusted drugs that produce immediate effects on consciousness, with good reason. When used on a regular basis, drug – from alcohol to heroin – that immediately improve mood or lessen anxiety reliably extract long term costs in misery that far outweigh any short-term relief or pleasure.
Medications that produce long-term improvements in mood and anxiety without any appreciable immediate conscious effects have become the bedrock of modern psychopharmacology. In addition to avoiding the obvious dangers inherent to drugs of abuse, the clinical effects of antidepressants align nicely with the reductionistic ethos that permeates psychiatry that sees consciousness as dependent on, and epiphenomenal to, the more basic unconscious neurobiological processes that drive who we are.
Despite strong evidence linking the immediate conscious effects of psychedelics to their long-term therapeutic benefits, major pharmaceutical efforts are underway to remove these immediate effects, based on the conviction that the immediate psychedelic experience cannot have causal power, and its presence is unnecessary if only it could be separated from the basic neurobiological effects that these drugs must have to explain their efficacy.
Dr. Raison has taken a leadership role in the development of psychedelic medicines as potential treatments for major depression. He was named one of the world’s most influential researchers by Web of Science for the decade of 2010-2019. Dr. Raison received the Raymond Pearl Memorial Award from the Human Biology Association “in his contributions to our understanding of evolutionary biocultural origins of mental health and illness.” Dr. Raison has also won the 2024 Emory University Science on Spiritual Health Torch and Trumpet Award “for a career devoted to the mental and spiritual health of humanity by responding and attending to suffering with a compassionate heart and a keen scientific mind.” With Vladimir Maletic, he is author of “The New Mind-Body Science of Depression” published in 2017.
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