Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. The podcast to help you in your journey

towards becoming a wise, empathic, genuine and connected mental health professional.

I'm your host, Dr. David Puder, a psychiatrist who splits his time practicing psychopharmacology,

individual and group psychotherapy, medical director of a day treatment program,

medical education research, and teaching residents and medical students.

So I'm back here with Dr. Cummings and an excellent psychopharmacologist.

Looked out in the community as someone to ask the difficult questions of,

and we're actually going to be going back into some of the basics of psychopharmacology

and doing a little bit of a series together over the next couple months.

And today we're going to be going over how psychiatric medications bind to receptors.

And some of the basic pharmacology stuff that you need to know to understand how

psychiatric medications work. So welcome to the podcast.

Well, thank you. I'm glad to be back.

Indeed, we're going to go with some of the core concepts in both pharmacology and psychopharmacology.

These are often materials that either people weren't introduced to thoroughly,

or it's been so long since they sat through a pharmacology class that some of the ideas have kind of gone away.

Probably the place to begin is with just defining what psychopharmacology and psychopharmacology medications are.

Psychopharmacology is a sub branch of psychiatry that deals with medications and substances

that affect the way the brain works, both positively and negatively.

And then psychopharmacology agents or medications are essentially any medications

that's used to treat an illness or condition whose primary signs and symptoms are disturbances

in things like mood, cognitive processes, behavioral control.

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